After continuing awful performance (messages not sending, sporadic connectivity), followed by a week of utterly appalling battery life (from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes today – while doing not-a-lot), I decided it was finally time for a new phone.

I compared and compared and compared, made a spreadsheet, crowd sourced with colleagues and the children and eventually settled on a mid-range iphone and visited an Optus (my phone provider) store this afternoon.

I’ve recently moved to a sim only (calls and data) plan, but I’ve been pretty happy with the provider, so intended to upgrade to a better plan with phone included. Sure I could buy a new phone outright, but a better plan just seemed easier.

Once at the store and faced with the phones in Real Life, my ideas of what I wanted rather altered. Why not go for the top-of-the-range? Why am I always picking second, third best? Surely I’m worth it?

So I did in fact go for top of the range – at more than double what I’m currently paying.

Ahhh, would that it was so simple.

I’d only signed up to my new plan in the last few months after rolling of a phone and data contract, so it was going to cost for me to $250 to get out of that contract and onto the new one. Wut?

I could phone Optus to try and get out of that fee, but there was nothing the guy in the Optus store could do. Really? Nothing? Not even call them (you *are* them!) for me and sort it out there? Nope.

So $250 extra to pay Optus much (much!) more than I am paying now? $250 extra for getting my phone from Optus rather than just going to the apple store?

Yeah, nah – as we say in the antipodes.

I did call Optus later and they could waive the $250 fee and ship a phone to me, but I couldn’t collect from a store. I wasn’t keen to wait for a week, so thanks-no-thanks.

So now I’m wondering if TheUniverse is trying to tell me:

1. Stick with terribly performing phone – pros: SML has commenced paying me a fixed $ phone allowance, the allowance is more than my current plan costs ($10 a month bonus!) | cons: aforementioned appalling issues with performance

2. Buy the top-of-range phone outright – pros: it’s very very fancy | cons: it’s wildly expensive, i don’t actually do that much with my phone

3. Buy the mid-range phone outright – pros: slightly less eye-poppingly expensive (only slightly) | cons: not totally fancy, but still much superior to my current appalling one

Will report back.