In follow up to my post about the different mobile phone providers in Australia, I’d like to share with you what I ended up doing about my overpriced phone account. To sum up the previous post, I wanted a new post-paid phone plan that cost less than my existing Telstra pre-paid plan (about $30-$50 AUD a month).
I ended up deciding to go with Virgin Mobile, since they seemed to offer the best deal overall. I chose the $25/mo Rollover Caps Plus, which includes $60 worth of calls and 300MB of Internet data.
Although I was originally planning to get a phone with the plan (probably a Nokia 6220 or N79), I ended up not doing this for three reasons. The first is that I get $10 extra call credit a month if I don’t get a phone. The second is that the phone I really want (an HTC Touch Pro2) isn’t available through Virgin Mobile, and I really like this phone. Looking at it causes drooling. The third and final reason is that the plan then has no contract length, I can leave at any time, instead of being locked in for 24 months. This does however mean I don’t get to take advantage of the 4000 bonus Velocity points offer.
I’ll reserve judgement on Virgin until I’ve used them more, but so far I have nothing major to report. The order process was moderately painless, as was the activation process (though they could improve it by marking which of the fields on the form where optional or not). I also transferred across my old mobile phone number to the new plan. This was supposed to take ‘up to three hours’. It actually took longer.
So far I’m liking Virgin. I’ll let you know if anything bad happens.