cell phones for the masses

I bought a cell phone today at a place called CyberMart. It's a Nokia 6610, the same kind I used to have in the States. I bought it for 770 yuan, or about $95. I also bought a SIM card with the following plan: regardless of the number of calls you make, each month you must put down money for text messaging. The first month, you must deposit 20 yuan, and every month thereafter you can deposit just 10 yuan. Text messages are 0.05 yuan a piece. That means I have 400 text messages to use this first month. I've never sent a text message in my life; I don't know what I'm going to with 400. But if I don't use them, I'm only down $2.50, so no big loss. Calls are pay-as-you-go, which means I only have to pay for what I use. With this plan, daytime calls are 0.2 yuan/minute; nighttime calls are half that. That means for one US dollar, I can talk for 40 minutes during the day, or 80 minutes at night, which is when I'm most likely to use the phone anyway. International calls are more expensive - "expensive" being a relative term - and cost something like 0.6 yuan/minute, which is still cheaper than a lot of phone cards. Needless to say, it's no wonder even the poor, working class Chinese are walking around with the latest in cell phone technology.