Gravitational Pull

Ah Europe, land of cell phone greatness

Posted on 06 June 2008

The phone is ringing, it’s 4 a.m. Who do you want answering that (mobile) phone? Me, of course. I’m in London, however, so your 4 a.m. is what we like to call 9 a.m. here in England. I’m on a sort of mini-holiday over here enjoying the many beautiful sights, unusually fine weather and amazing cell phone service. How can that be? My Verizon-powered hulking brute, the Treo 700p, is a CDMA-only sort of chap and I’m in the land of GSM (well, really almost everywhere in the world ‘cept the U.S. and Japan are lands of GSM).

So how’d I do it? Simple – I avoided all the hassles of expensive phones and monthly contracts and bought a cheap pay-as-you-go phone that works here and in the states. It did take an absurd amount of scampering around central London to find a cell phone store (minor digression: picture me walking around amidst crowds of people ALL GABBING ON THEIR CELL PHONES unable to locate a cell phone store). When I finally located the local outlet of T-Mobile, I faced an unbelievable array of over 20 phones available for pay-as-you-go, ranging from $250 Sony Ericsson smart phones to $40 cheap Nokia’s.

I opted for a relatively cheap Nokia 6111 (pictured above) because it works on GSM frequencies both here and back in the USA. Like all GSM phones, it has a replacable SIM card so I can take it home and get a US phone number by swapping out the card for a local one. With the keypad slid into the closed position, this phone could almost be a cigarette lighter. It’s that small and light. It has a built-in camera that can take JPEG snapshots at up to 1152×864 and short videos. It also has Bluetooth, instant messaging, a web browser, a voice recorder and about a dozen other features. Good things come in small packages here in the UK, it seems.

One thing that blew me away in the T-Mobile store beyond the amazing selection of phones was the price of Internet service: 15 pounds a month, or a little over $30, or half the cost of the best rate you can get in the U.S. Consider me officially jealous.