The Phone Balance Challenge: Day 1

Good morning!

A few weeks ago I bought a new phone from phone network 3. A Nokia e63. It was on a prepay basis so I topped up with the second most highest available top up; $69. I didn't really know the timescales of this budget, so I chose to aim for the higher end of the phone credit scale. Better safe than sorry. But I didn't realise the full extent of what I had just purchased. I had not bought $69 of simple phone credit. I had bought a $69 phone package. It included money to spend in 3's mobile zone, an amount of money to spend on reduced-rate international calls, internet usage, SMS and the normal phone calls! This is awesome. Plus 3's service is brilliant. I get great reception everywhere.
Anyway, back to my original theme. The challenge.
3 had given me a massive 500 and something AUD to spend in one month. "Great, what I'll do is rinse out some YouTube (but only moderately, as there is that warning at the start that says 'may involve high data usage'), download some apps and games, check my email every 5 minutes during waking hours, maybe some Facebook, news websites, sports....oooo, i'm gonna have so much fun". So this is what I have been doing on my phone this past month.

Below is a picture of my phone as of 7am this morning.















Nearly $300 left. And only until 7th Nov 2010 to spend it. Is that a challenge my little phone?! Well, I take it as a challenge. Albeit, surprisingly difficult. There are a few rules too. International calls are not allowed. They're just not. 3 blocks them. I need to sign up to another add-on, even though I have $4.50 of international calls left. Slightly stupid, but not to worry too much. I also get free calls to other numbers on my network. And the call rates are relatively inexpensive anyway. I don't know how many call minutes I have left but my balance indicates that it's a lot. It'll take too long to use up my remaining balance. I also can't download things from the 3 Store as i only have $0.7 of credit left there. To stream TV shows I also need to sign up for some sort of deal. I can't do that now with only 5 days left.

I attempted yesterday to see how much money I could use. Unfortunately there were storms yesterday in Sydney so I couldn't connect to the 3g network properly. I did manage to use up $23 of my balance though. Downloaded a song, streamed music I already have, sent some picture messages and emails and sent a few 500 character SMSes (which was a struggle being male. What do you write for 3 pages??)

I even composed this blog post in my phone's text editor just so I could email it to my work computer then post it to my blog. 16 pages so far.

In order to complete this challenge I need to average a daily balance decrease of about $60. The most elegant and inefficient (but beneficial to me) use of my remaining balance will be my chosen solution. I have idea of installing a Symbian-based Bit Torrent client on my phone and seeing what damage I can do. Any other suggestions before the deadline; 23:59:59 this Sunday night will be welcomed. I'll post my results and if I was able to meet the challenge too...