At 10:24pm this evening, Annette told me that a friend, Graemehad told her that a friend of his had an iPhone for sale. I was obviously interested, and resolved to ring Graeme the next day. But Annette said that I should ring Graeme now - he hadn’t gone to bed yet, and was waiting for me to call.

I rang him, and he told me that the iPhone belonged to a mate who was returning to USAria on Friday - less than 48 hours away. He gave me this chap’s phone number; I rang and left a message. Five minutes later Arthur rang me back and said that the best thing would be for me to meet him in Johnsonville in fifteen minutes, if I was interested, and that it would cost $NZ600 ($US481). He had bought it new in January, but needed the cash.

So I drove over to Johnsonville, chucked my credit card into a hole in the wall, took out the money, made the obligatory joke about it looking like a drug deal, and now I have an iPhone (called Kotare , the New Zealand kingfisher). It’s got the latest firmware, and connects to the local Voda network without a hitch.

From hearing about it to plugging it into my iMac to sync took less than forty minutes.

Cool!

Do the internet features work on-the-go (not connected to WiFi)?

Yes, but hugely expensive. I’ll set up a data account with Voda tomorrow, to lessen the burden. Bastards.