Can’t keep your hands off your mobile? Thankfully for text maniacs, a clever nifty loophole can slash the cost of texting to a fraction of a penny per text from your mobile; or get free texts via the internet, writes Martin Lewis of moneysavingexpert.com.

 

This is quite a long article, so you may wish to print it off to read at your leisure, bearing in mind that you may have to return to this page to click on the links.

 

WHICH SYSTEM SUITS YOU?

It's quick, it's easy, and it means you can have a conversation in your own time zone; yet texting can cost a fortune. Many people text over 20 times a day and as standard text costs could be 12p, that’d add up to £72 a month or even £864 a year! Yet there’s a simple path to slamming down the cost.

Of course if your mobile contract includes free texts, you should use them, but after that there are four main ways of cutting the cost.

 

· Free texts via a PC. If you’re near a computer when you need to text, simply text at no cost on the web. More details: FREE TEXTS FROM THE WEB (below)

· Text for under 0.5p from mobiles. There’s a cunning, simple to use, piece of free software you put on your mobile, which sends your texts via its mobile internet, at a fraction of the cost, to phones worldwide. More details: FREE TEXTS FROM YOUR MOBILE WITH MOBILE INTERNET (below)

· Get more free texts. If you regularly go over your free texts allocation, you may be able to increase it at no-cost. If you don’t use them all, it’s likely you’re overpaying for your mobile, so reduce your package.

· Get a cheap sim for texting. If your mobile package can’t be made text-friendly, get a special sim card to pop in the back just for texting.

Send shorter messages. Well, ok, this one's a bit of fun, but if you learn to 'spk txt' you can get more in each message, and never go into double messages, thus cutting down the cost. Try the Lingo2word translator to see how.

 

FREE TEXTS FROM THE WEB

A raft of websites offer free text messages via the internet. So if you’re near a PC and fancy texting don’t pick up the phone; type it into the computer. The main drawback is there may be a line of advertising attached to your message.

 

The top free text websites

· Unlimited texts without registering: Cbfsms allows free texts without the need to register. There’s no limit to how many messages you can send, though texts can be delayed when the site is busy.

· 10 free texts daily: Fonetastic gives 10 free texts a day and feedback indicates that the service is reliable. Yet the drawback is you must agree to receive marketing texts from it and its partner companies.

· 10 free texts monthly: O2* offers 10 free texts month to everyone, including non-O2 customers, who register for the service. While the allocation is on the stingy side, reports are the service is fast and reliable so it’s useful for urgent/important messages.

· Free international texts: SendSMSNow lets you sign up and send free unlimited international texts to some countries including the USA, Canada, Poland and India. You can also receive replies free to your own online inbox. It doesn’t let you send texts to the UK though.

· Orange customers: Anyone on Orange, or who has an Orange Sim, gets 30 free texts a month via the orange website. For non-Orange customers, simply buy a £1 pay as you go Sim card and register the SIM online to get the free texts. This will also allow you to use the Orange 2for1 cinema loophole

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Tips for sending texts from the internet

Remember, text via the internet and the message won’t appear to be from your phone so always sign your name to let people know who sent it. This does also have the downside that people can’t just click reply to send you a message back; yet if you include your phone number too, it makes it much easier for people.

 

FREE TEXTS FROM YOUR MOBILE WITH MOBILE INTERNET

There's a clever new service from Vyke Mobile* that utilizes the fact it costs a fraction of a price to use mobile internet than it does to text. If you've a phone which has web or WAP access, which is most phones bought in the last three or four years, you can take advantage.

Just download the free software, and then text from your mobile to other UK or worldwide mobiles for a fraction of a penny. The system feels virtually identical to normal texting (you can even use your phones address book) but is actually sending the texts via your mobile's internet service. Better still the message comes from your own mobile phone, so mates can reply easily.

 

How much does it cost?

There are no costs for downloading the software, (barring data access costs) but there are two costs associated with sending texts.

· Vyke’s Charge. If the person you’re texting also has the software downloaded it's free. If not, you pay it 1p per text (though it gives you $1 credit to start with, which is worth about 50 texts). After this you need to top it up, the minimum amount is £10. So where possible, suggest to those you text regularly that they get the software too. This works just like normal texting, they’ll simply get an alert of a new message appearing on their phone.

· The Web/WAP charge. Sending a text via the internet only uses a tiny chunk of data and shouldn’t cost more than a penny. This does beg the question why mobile networks get away with charging so much in the first place. Of course the actual cost depends on your own WAP/web access costs, which are measured in megabytes. Vyke estimates you can send 800 texts per megabyte, so if your provider charges a typical £3/megabyte, that means each text costs around a third-of-a-penny per text. If you’re not sure, why not just try ten or twenty texts for the first month, then check your bill to see the cost. Plus, when your phone is on, to enable you to receive messages, the Vyke software needs to connect to see if you've got any. This involves a small amount of data use. For someone whose phone is on 24-7, this could cost a pound or two a month. Again, if you're not sure, why not try ten or twenty texts for the first month and check your bill to see what it costs.

Using mobile internet from abroad can be more costly and often companies charge an initial connection fee so be careful doing this. Though texting a friend who lives abroad isn't a problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step-by-Step Guide to using Vyke

· Step one: Check you have the right equipment To run Vyke, the phone must have mobile data access (GPRS, EDGE, 3G), which most phones do. It also needs to support Java applications (most relatively new phones will do this). The only exception is that those using 3 Mobile can’t access the system as it doesn’t allow you to use third party applications. Vyke’s website* has a full guide to making sure your phone is correctly configured.

· Step two: Register for Vyke Mobile First register with Vyke for free on its website (from a computer not via the phone), then go to the Vyke Mobile download page to get ‘Vyke Mobile Pro’. If you’ve a lower-spec phone you might have to download its older software ‘Vyke Mobile Lite’; yet here you will always pay 1p per text, even if your friends have Vyke downloaded.

· Step three: Download the software Once you’ve registered Vyke will send a text to your mobile with a web link; click that and it’ll enable you to quickly download the software (which may cost a few pennies in data charges). It’s usually very easy to follow but if you’ve any problems, check out Vyke’s FAQs.

Step four: Get texting! Now open the Vyke programme (if you can’t find it, it will probably be in your phones ‘My applications’ folder) and start texting. All you do is click ‘new message’ and click who in your phone’s address book you want to send it to (or enter the number).

 

ALTERNATIVE OPTIONS FOR TEXTING FROM YOUR MOBILE

Tex2me allows you to download software onto your phone and it enables you to send messages to anyone else with the software for free. The downside is the text messages don’t pop in your text in-box, the person your texting needs to have the application open to make it work.

There’s also Smsbug, which again uses internet technology to send actual text messages, though it charges around 3 Euro cents, that’s about 2p, per text.

 

GETTING A TEXTING SIM CARD

If your current contract or pay-as-you-go mobile is expensive for texting, then simply get a special Sim card which is cheap for texting and use that.

What’s a Sim card?

The Sim is the small (roughly 2cm by 1cm) microchip card that you insert into a phone when it's first set up. It provides the identity of a phone for the mobile network, so it can recognise, bill and send calls to individual customers.

The Sim card is usually located behind the battery on the back of the phone. Therefore when you temporarily change the Sim card in your phone, you've technically got a phone from another network. This does mean your texts will come from a different phone number too.

You may need to unlock your handset
One tiny fly in the ointment is that when you put the Sim card in your phone it may not work. That's because some mobile networks lock handsets so only its Sim cards can be used in the phone.

 

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