Having an expensive phone but communicating cheaply!

If you thought that you can save money in this times of Worldwide Recession(Even Young Jeezy just released a tight album named The Recession) by buying a cheap phone and buying sim cards from "the network with the most subscribers" and "the clearest network" or the new network in town, you aren't that correct. You can buy a middle end phone or a high end phone, and end up cutting on communication costs, such that you end up with the same or lower maintenance budget as that of a cheap phone.

how?, well middle-end and high-end phones from standard manufacturers(read non-china-mobile) come with Java. You can ask that geek friend of yours to explain what Java is, and its mobile implementation J2me(Java platform micro edition) are, or rather, you can just wikipedia them. For a brief explanation, Java is a programming platform that is implemented across varying devices irrespective of their architecture. This means that one java program can be run on different hardware(phones) from different manufacturers(vendors).

Java is found on many colour-screen phones with a camera(expect those number models from China). If your phone has Java, you can download many useful applications free of charge or buy them. Among such applications , are web browsers, which allow you to surf the Internet at a cost of a few cents per page.Also we have chatting applications that you and your friends can download and use to chat instead of sms or calling, again at a cost of a few shillings per hour(yeah, no typing mistake there).

The web browsers allow you to surf the Internet and open many (not all) pages comfortably, from anywhere there is gprs coverage. Among the top browsers are Opera Mini(mini.opera.com) and UCweb6(wap.ucweb.com[select English, and try a different network-read zain-if the one you are using says server or page unavailable]). For lower end phones(read cheaper) you may prefer using the lighter UCweb if Opera is too sluggish.

Instead of calling your friends for hours on end, you can download some chatting applications like nimbuzz(wap.nimbuzz.com) or mig33(wap.mig33.com) which are free, and allow you to send instant messages to your friends . some even allow you to send images and other files, again at a low cost.

I am not going to tell you how cheap they be, try that for yourself. As of today Safaricom Gprs/Edge/Broadband(are they sure that is broadband) costs Kshs. 8/= per Megabyte while Zain costs Kshs. 10/= per megabyte. A heavy chatter can accumulate costs of about 10shs in 3 hours.

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Dennis Kioko

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