The fee now for a typical transaction is 0.1 mBTC, currently 1.3 US cent. (This is for up to a 1 KB transaction)

You don't have to download the whole blockchain to use Bitcoin. You can use clients such as MultiBit (https://multibit.org - I am the lead dev) or Electrum (http://electrum.org). These are only a few megabytes to download and you'll be up and running in minutes.