Hey all, I need some advise, I have a friend who lives in Australia and I myself live in the UK, we text regularly and well obviously you can guess it costs a fair bit. Is there any special kind of sim card or phone card that can be used which has say certain amount of call time and texts to say your chosen country? I know in australia they have something like this, some phone card they top up with XXX amount and they put some code in front of the persons number and then that somehows deducts the amount of free call time and texts from the phone card. I currently own a o2 Iphone on contract
yeah i know who doesnt know about email but sometimes people dont want to email and prefer to be able to have a chat a lot faster than email lol and yeah i know these days a lot of mobiles you can email people from them but really its not always that convenient lol
You could research Skypephones. They use the 3G signal to route your call through Skype's servers to the Aussie Skype servers, giving you much, much cheaper international calls. At least, I think that's how it works.
Buy a skype enabled phone and either get it on contract with lots of data, or just get it on 3. http://www.three.co.uk/Pay_As_You_Go/Top_ups_the_free_stuff i bought my phone about two weeks ago, topped it up once with £10 on pay as you go, and ive been using skype 5days a week for 1+ hours, and i still haven't touched my credit yet.
I've been thinking about getting a three MI-FI thing(basicly a mini 3g wireless router) and using it with my ipod touch, my only issue is i might go through about £10 every couple of months on my current phone but will skype+3g cost me more?
assuming you both have data enabled, have you tried setting up a private twitter account for each of you? similar length messages but essentially free
Orange PAYG sim: fixed mobile text Australia 6p 13p 15p http://www1.orange.co.uk/service_plans/payasyougo/payg_camel_costs.html
if you have an iPhone (with 3g), just text via email. method - not sure if it will work with UK and AU carriers, but it definitely does in the US.
Putting email on your handset is probably the easiest way, although that'll depend on your friend's handset. Who says the emails you send have to be any longer than a SMS is?
If your friend has an iPhone have a look at whatsapp... texting over wi-fi / 3g effectively. Comes up as a text when your iPhone is locked... it's sometimes a few minutes delayed, but that's pretty rare. Ohh, and the app only costs 59p! Also works iPhone > blackberry. Android and Symbian coming soon... http://www.whatsapp.com/
http://internationalcalls.vodafone.co.uk/ 5p/min landlines, 15p/min mobiles. Same price as I pay to the UK on T-Mobile.
hhmm the email/sms seemed to work i can use my Iphone email app to send text emails to my own mobile (tested it out) but I gotta setup a email number for her so that I can do that and send messages her that way. Im thinking of ringing up o2 and getting the International Traveller Service and Discount country bolt on thing (found this out last night)
Does anyone know if the Three Australian mobile network has a sms gateway? Ive used google to no avail
