Cheaper mobile messaging
Thursday, 7. June 2007, 02:36:30
I was playing with an idea: How to get cheaper text messages?
How about sending Email from your phone instead of SMS messages?
It might be feasible, depending on your operator and phone capabilities.
There are also some problems you may have to deal with.
How about sending Email from your phone instead of SMS messages?
It might be feasible, depending on your operator and phone capabilities.
There are also some problems you may have to deal with.
I took one finnish mobile phone service provider's SMS price:
0,07 euro per message
So that's 7 cents for 160 characters.
I also compared their GPRS data prices:
0,0015 euro per kilobyte
You can fit much more letters in one kB than just 160, and for just 0,15 cents!
See the obvious difference? Sending email would be much cheaper than sending SMS messages.
But there are two problems:
Since data transfer costs both for sent and received data, if you receive a lot of email it would mean it might get to be more expensive than using SMS. You could receive something like 45 1kB emails before reaching the price to send a single SMS, though.
Some providers also have a service which forwards email you receive to your phone via SMS. This would naturally fix the problem: Receiving SMS messages is free (at least here). However, there might be an additional monthly fee for the forwarding service, depending on the provider.
So that's the problem number one. The second problem is the fact that most people can't read mail on their phone. You could probably convince your friends to get a email forwarding service like above, but they still can't reply to you except with SMS - which doesn't necessarily matter if the forwarding doesn't extra.
Conclusion
So basically said, by sending email instead of SMS you could achieve big savings. You could even buy a 100mb per month data service which makes for much cheaper kB's than mentioned above - the price was taken from a "normal" service. The problems do exist, though.
WIDGETIZE
DrLaunch # 7. June 2007, 06:58
Since many big e-mail providers offer a version of their service suitable for mobile phones, they could use Opera Mini or their WAP browser (which actually cost less with some carriers). Or even cheaper, an email client for J2ME.
But... Even phones which does not focus on business needs come with email clients built in these days. So things are going to change.