My cellphone, a Sony Ericsson K800i, has a screen only marginally bigger than a postage stamp. That’s part of the reason why I don’t really actually use it much for anything except phonecalls and txting (and taking photos). That, plus my fear of the cost of doing anything else.

When I was in Hamilton for the Engage your Community conference though I experimented one evening with looking at a few RSS feeds and (trying) to read a couple of news items from Stuff, or maybe it was the NZ Herald. That was all fairly unsuccessful — it was slow and the web pages were truly dreadful and unreadable on the phone.

A month or so later I received the bill for that attempt: $20! I won’t be trying that again in a hurry.

Or maybe I will. On 11 July the iPhone will finally arrive in New Zealand. I’ll be buying one as soon as possible, because I’m just that sort of person.

With the iPhone comes proper web surfing, email, RSS feeds and so on. And with the arrival of the iPhone comes a huge change from Vodafone. I’ll let Rod Drury explain it, in his post $1 a day:

Vodafone launches $1 a day mobile broadband

Vodafone has blown apart the mobile data market with the launch of its new casual rate of $1 a day.

From July 28, customers will be able to surf the net, download music and games and play on their favourite sites without committing to a fixed monthly data contract.

The $1 a day casual rate gives customers up to 10MB of data – more than enough for most casual users on their mobile devices. Customers who go over that limit will be charged at $1 per megabyte and users who regularly need more can take advantage of our suite of data plans.

[Via : Rod Drury > $1 a day.]

Read Rod’s full post for more of the story, and also read the many many comments on his post, including those from Paul Brislen, boss of Vodafone.

So why am I mentioning this? Because it will change the way Kiwis use their cellphones. For community organisations that means they may change the ways they go about their business. It also definitely means that the people they are trying to reach — volunteers, clients, customers, stakeholders — all have more possibilities open to them.

We’ll keep an eye on this. Change is in the air.

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