Cheap,cheap,cheap..

My good friend Murray O'Neil recently spent 6 weeks in and around Belgium, The UK and Germany. He returned home to find a bill from Vodafone for nearly $1500 worth of txt and voice calls. A text from Germany while roaming will cost you the princely sum of $1. If you group text 20 people to tell them you are now a proud Uncle to a little girl, complete with updates, as he did, that would cost you $20 a pop.
It's not hard to see where the money went. !!

Now other than this blog, and email (yay! the clinic has wireless LAN) I intend to send a lot of texts. But not at $1 a pop!
I fired up Google and went hunting for "SMS software" found quite a few, including some free ones that included advertising messages, not a good thing.

One program that caught my eye was Clickatell's Messenger-PRO.
I tested it out and it looked perfect for my needs. For just $27 I purchased 300 credits which are then used up at various rates depending on where you are texting to.
Texts sent to New Zealand from my laptop will cost the paltry sum of just 8cents each. What's better is that the messages appear to the recipient to have come from my phone, so replies are received as they usually would on my mobile.

Of course the biggest hurdle is the different time zones. I'll be 10 hours behind meaning that most of my waking hours are in the middle of the night NZ time. I suggest you don't sleep with your phone beside the bed if you want a good nights sleep! :->