Skip the morning coffee and pick up this phone instead!

Imagine the following scenario. Your friend asks you to borrow a dollar, but doesn't tell you what it's for. You, being such a nice friend, give your old pal a dollar. He runs into a store, and comes out 5 minutes later with a brand new cell phone, and get this... he's not on any plan. Impossible? No, he could very well have just stolen the phone!

But he didn't. In fact, there's a new phone, the OT-209 by Alcatel out of England, which is offered for only 99 pence. How is this possible? Well, even after reading these articles, I'm not entirely sure how it is that this company can make a profit from this. That is, unless hundreds of thousands of people buy these phones, and then tell their friends to buy it too, just in time for Christmas. And apparently, that's exactly what the company is aiming to do.

They teamed up with Virgin Mobile, to offer this phone for less than a pound, on no fixed-term contract, and you only have to pay 10 pounds to start making all your calls and texts from it, with no additional fees at all. The Alcatel Executive Chairman, Charles Dunstone, says "You have to remember at Christmas the one question we get asked the most in our stores is 'what's your cheapest phone?' and at 99p this is the lowest its ever been."

The phone is aimed at first-time users, cash-strapped citizens, and people looking for a good, cheap backup phone. It's only offered in England at the moment, but this idea seems intriguing to me, and it just might make it's way across the ocean soon enough.

1000 text messages: $100
60 minutes of talk-time: $15
Getting a new phone: Priceless


... well... technically it's 99 pence... and then you add in the 10 pounds of talk time soooo... yeah.