The Ryndex

Roger raised some good points — boorishness and price. I don’t have to deal with the former, since I’ve yet to receive a telephone call on the infernal talking-device.

As for initial capital costs, I stole the phone from the lab. Well, technically, I went to the head of our unit and graciously offered to conduct “personal field trials” in order to brainstorm new mobile services in an “authentic user milieu”.

Ongoing costs are limited to the mobile subscription. I looked at the major operators in Paris (Orange, SFR and Bouygues) and compared their plans. I went with Bouygues Telecom, because I like their name.

Bweeg bweeg bweeg. BWEEEEEEEG! Earth dwellers, this is Lieutenant Bweeg of the Intergalaxia Invasion Force. Put down your weapons immediately and your planet will be spared. Resist, and you will be vaporized by our Plasmatrogic Hyperbolators. Bweeg out.

Phonetics are everything.

The plan is tolerable for prepaid: about 50 euro cents a minute, local SMS at 10 centimes, foreign SMS at 30 centimes, some sort of “listen to ads for free minutes” deal, and eventually GPRS at 1.5 centimes a kilo-octet. That’s nearly 10,000€ to download the equivalent of a CD! Or 0.03€ for the average email.

Anyway, the day after I subscribe, the entire network goes down in a spectacular crash. At first, I just thought the coverage was super crappy, but it turns out that it’s all over the news. Free gifts for every subscriber!

Did you know… given the excellent competition in Canadian long distance plans and the European “caller pays” aspect, it’s more expensive for my neighbour to call me than for someone in Canada? In fact, if I wanted to call my neighbour on her mobile phone from my fixed line, the per-minute rate would be cheaper for a Canadian friend to set us up a three-way call.

Also, did you know… a good time to call me would be 7:05am in my morning on weekdays. We can chat for ten minutes while I’m walking to the bus!