Monday, January 7, 2008

Packet8 announces free trial program for MobileTalk

Maybe Packet8 heard me nagging about the high price for their Mobiletalk callthrough software, which includes no VoIP minutes. Just hours after my blog post told how great their Mobiletalk software could be if it wasn't mutilated and overpriced, Packet8 announces the launch of a no obligation, no fee trial program.
With the MobileTalk free trial program, wireless customers can download the MobileTalk application onto their mobile device and use the service at no charge until a total of $2.00 in per minute fee is reached.

The Mobiletalk software is great and now people can get to know it before they subscribe. But the one-time $9.99 activation fee for the service and a monthly fee of $9.99 for non-Packet 8 subscribers seems too much to me. Packet8 should slash the monthly fee and sell the software for $30.

After all they make their money with VoIP minutes.

4 comments:

  1. packet8 is not about to sell the software open to be used outside there network. therefore i think a $30 fee is unreasonable. the software should be free as to encourage the use of there long distance minutes.

    would you pay for a softphone in order to use a VOIP service? MobileTalk is the mobile equivalent of a closed branded softphone.

    sorry no monthly fee or purchase from this guy.

    for an open generic version that i can use with an calling card would be a different story. you may very well get $30 from me for that. but i am than going to use the cheapest(with decent call quality - but experience tells me there no direct correlation between cost and quality in the telephony world; some of the best priced cards also have excellent call quality) calling cards i can get my hands on.

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  2. 10 years ago lots of cell phone models(form nokia, motorola, siemens, etc.) had built in calling card programmability. usually you would hold down the call button for an extra second and the phone would automatically call the breakin number, enter your PIN, and dial the number. i am not finding this on any recent model phones. i suspect the the operators have asked the phone manufactures to remove the functionality.

    what would make mobiletalk different is if it could determine your current location and route to different breakin numbers. i have not read anything that indicates to me that is the case. Marcus, do you have such functionality on your copy? if so you would than have the automatic roaming capabilities you talked about on voxalot and tpad forums. if not this seems like a gimmicky martketing campaign about a feature that was once included on many cheap GSM handsets.

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  3. As you can read in my former blog post, the underlying software of Mobile Talk comes from the Israeli company Mobilemax and has much more features than what Packet8 uses.

    Mobilemax' Director of Business Development, Perry Nalevka, told me that it supports "Roaming location based callthrough with multiple access numbers automatically selects the relevant access number according to the user's location".

    That's exactly what you are asking for. Too sad that Packet8 makes no use of this feature and I cannot scrutinize it. We just made a quick installation with just only one callthrough number from Germany.

    Hopefully Mobilemax will tell us more.

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  4. Markus is correct and we do have the capability to take the roaming information from the GSM network. We can then use this information as a parameter in deciding how and where to route the call to. Simply said we can base the access number on the location of the user. I would be happy to demo this feature.
    Perry Nalevka
    perry.nalevka@mobile-mx.com

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