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> Shout free SMS? anyone used it?
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http://www.getjar.com/products/16997/Shout
has anyone used this?
does it work?
Cheers!
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Posted: 2008-08-23 14:48:50
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no, but im very interested after reading! are these things legal? and do your texts still send from your same number?
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Posted: 2008-08-23 18:36:17
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This application does NOT send free real SMS. If the receiver also has the application installed and running on their phone then it sends an instant message which is what Shout calls an SMS. If the receiver does not have Shout then it tries to send an SMS using your standard phone SMS and therefore costing you your usual network rate! Note that they do not mention this at all on getjar. The registration text it sends is an Isle of Man number which cost me 22p to text because it is international, not standard UK rate which would usually be free in my case. Also its absolutely pointless cus you can spoof it from any online text service. It should send an sms to you with a code in instead of the other way around... The interface looks interesting but is slow to use as every time you want to fill in a field it opens it in a new screen so it is nothing like a normal phone SMS interface. I don't know where they got the 500kb per month data usage from as the GPRS needs to reconnect constantly if it is inactive or signal drops and each time it uses up to 1kb, especially if a message is sent. It used about 10k in 2 hours and my friends message didnt come through to me until I restarted Shout. Why not just call it an instant messenger?!
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Posted: 2008-08-25 15:42:34
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On 2008-08-23 18:36:17, siamese plantpot wrote:
no, but im very interested after reading! are these things legal? and do your texts still send from your same number?
It works great for me. In the app, when my friends get texts from me, they see my name and my same phone number. Here is what they wrote to that comment that someone else posted - sorry, it's a long one!:
Let me address your comments one by one if I may. We don't think that our service is like IM services because we don't require you to register with a 3rd party account, but rather just use your phone number like you do with SMS today. What we offer is an alternative to using SMS where you aren't charged per message as you would be by your mobile carrier. For those who send international SMS, you know how much of a savings this can represent! We offer the convenience to enable you to send a message to your friend if they are not on SHOUT, from your phone directly, without having to exit the application and find some other way to tell them about it. We hope that most people appreciate the convenience as, in normal cases, they would be sending their friend an SMS directly anyway. Once their friend gets and installs SHOUT, then subsequent messages are sent over the SHOUT network and for FREE. To address your point about the cost of sending SMS, we are updating the application instructions to ensure that this is clear. We appreciate your pointing this out and it certainly is not our intent to mislead on the cost. Regarding the registration SMS, there is more to the process than just sending an SMS and so the security is something that is verified in relation to the phone application and the phone number. We find that sending a message from our server to you can often be delayed; however, we are looking at ways to improve this so that we can improve the registration process and eliminate the international SMS sending for registration. The user input is the same way as most J2ME applications have it where the application has been created for portability. We wish that it was more convenient, but it is a fine balance between custom input and ensuring that it works on most handsets. As for the usage of GPRS, we share your frustration! Your carrier (and it seems many others) do a couple of things to push up the usage and charge you more than you use. First, they disconnect you often and when you reconnect, regardless of how much data you use, charge you a minimum of 1k! If you are roaming, it could be more that this minimum (I had a colleague from Canada who was roaming in the UK and got charged 10k minimum). I would recommend to ask your carrier why they charge minimums and not for actual data usage. However, we stand by our claims for data usage. Our system is extremely lightweight and efficient, and in 2 hours, would only send 0.4k during that time. On the positive side, we expect that most carriers will start to charge for the actual amount used and hope that it is sooner rather than later. Again, thanks for the input and feedback. As we come out of beta, we will be incorporating the best of the feedback to make SHOUT the best that it can be.
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Posted: 2008-08-26 21:52:29
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