Over the years I’ve had more mobile phones than I care to remember. Most of them I’ve either sold on or given away to friends and family but I still have a pretty large collection. Hey, who knows, they might be worth some money one day.

The first mobile phone I had was bigger than a brick, probably heavier as well and with a battery life of a whopping 4 hours! Thankfully things have changed a lot and improvements unimaginable before are now a reality.

One of my most favourite phones was the Siemens SL55.

A triband phone with colour screen and polyphonic ringtones and a really tactile feel to it. It was so small you could lose it in your pocket and I used this phone for many months before continuing on my quest to find “The perfect mobile phone“.

The trouble with mobile phones is the technology moves on at a tremendous pace that within weeks of you getting your brand new phone it no longer cuts in anymore. This is what I found with the Siemens SL55. Great when I got it but lacking in a camera and bluetooth it just had to go.

I’m currently using a Motorola V3i that I’ve had for a while which I’m pretty much happy with but want to change soon. The only problem is looking around there isn’t much on offer that appeals to me. It seems we have gone past the days of miniaturization and phones seem to be getting bigger all the time.

I got an email from EasyMobile yesterday to inform me that they are to introduce a minimum call charge of 1 minute on the 1st October 2006 effectively meaning that the minimum call charge will now be 15p if you’re not calling another EasyMobile user.

This is a massive increase and I wonder if they are going to remain competitive? The main reason why I chose EasyMobile was that they charged by the second and if you were only on the phone for 10 seconds, you would only be charged for 10 seconds of usage.

I’ve been very happy with EasyMobile and found their customer service to be excellent but I think I may need to change supplier.

T-Mobile on a similar PAYG scheme are now charging 12p per minute with a minimum call charge of 5p. Their data costs are a lot more attractive too with unlimited data for a £1 a day compared to EasyMobile’s £3 per Mb. The only downside is if you call someone on the same network it still costs 12p per minute whereas with EasyMobile it only costs 3p per minute although that offer ends on 31st December 2006 and there is no telling how much it will cost after then.

The thing that annoys me about all these mobile companies is that I’m sure they make all their plans confusing on purpose so its impossible to compare between them. Unless you make the same amount of calls, texts and data usage every month you are just guessing and hoping for the best.