When we first came to Australia four years ago, I needed a mobile phone to use while looking for a job.  (‘‘Cellular phone’’ is the American term; ‘‘mobile phone’’ is the Australian term.)  I walked into a Vodafone shop near where we were staying in Kings Cross and bought an Alcatel phone on a pre-paid plan for A$80.  This included $30 in call credits, so the net cost of the phone was only $50, which I thought was a great bargain!  (That was in late January or early February 2000.)

Unfortunately, that phone stopped working about May 2002.  I called Vodafone several times to have the phone fixed but was unsuccessful.  The ‘‘Personal Unblocking Key’’ (PUK) did not work, and they couldn’t send me a new SIM card, because that particular Alcatel model used an older style card rather than the newer SIM-2 type.  I took the phone to a Vodafone store (in Parramatta, near where we now live), and they said the problem was with the phone rather than the SIM card.

By that time, however, I found that I did not have much of a need for a mobile phone, so I gave up on fixing the phone I had and did not bother to get a new one.  (My old phone had $22.57 in pre-paid call credits that finally expired 2 Nov 2003.)

I occasionally noticed advertisements for pre-paid mobile plans, but it seemed that prices had gone up since I bought my phone, and I never saw anything that looked like as good a deal as I had gotten before.  So I simply decided to do without a mobile phone for the last couple of years.

Finally, though, when we returned from our recent trip to America, Amy decided that we needed to get at least one new mobile phone -- and preferably two.  Now that we had two young kids, it was becoming more common for one of us to be out with one child and one at home with the other, or even for both of us to be out at the same time, and Amy wanted us to be able to contact each other in these situations.

So I embarked on a project to figure out which company and which mobile plan would be best for us.  After a complex analysis of 21 calling plans from six companies, resulting in a total of 85 different pricing scenarios based on various expected usage levels, we decided at the beginning of April to buy two new NEC e313 mobile phones on the ‘‘Three’’ network.

Each of our phones has a color screen and a built-in camera.  Our new mobile numbers are listed on our contact web page.  (My old mobile number is now obsolete, so you may delete it from your phone list.)

‘‘Three’’ is the only ‘‘3rd-generation’’ mobile network in Australia.  Here are some of the things we can do with our new phones:

• take still photos (in 4 resolutions up to 640x480 VGA)
  
• record video (176x144 QCIF, with or without sound)
  
• send multimedia (MMS) messages with photos and video to other mobile phones
  
• send and receive e-mail on our phones
  
• make live video calls to each other
  
• use Videotalk to PC to make live video calls to computers running Microsoft NetMeeting
  
• download ‘‘polyphonic ringtunes’’ and select a song that the phone will play when a call is received
  
• use several built-in applications including an appointment calendar, alarm clock, to-do list, notepad, calculator and foreign exchange converter
  
• download ‘‘Java’’ games and play them on the phone handset
  
• read the news, check the weather forecast, view movie trailers, read a local restaurant guide and access other data content provided by the ‘‘3’’ network
  
• browse web pages on the Internet
  

Of course, we can do the more mundane things that most mobile phones do, such as making regular voice calls, sending text (SMS) messages and retrieving voicemail.  Our phones also have call waiting and 3-way calling.

Below is an example of a still photo taken in each of the four resolutions supported by the phone.  The CLI (Caller Identification) size is normally used in the phone’s contact list.  Saving a photo in the contact list together with a person’s name and phone number allows the phone to display a picture of the person when a call is made to that person or when a call is received from that person’s phone.  (The phone number of the incoming call is determined using Caller ID.)

The following software enables you to communicate with our phones using your computer.

Play a video sent to you by e-mail from one of our phones.

Receive a live video call on your computer from one of our phones.  (This program may come installed with Windows XP, so before downloading, first check to see if your computer already has it.)