Meteor Mobile – Online Texting Now Improved…at last!

November 8th, 2007 Posted in Ireland, Mobile, Money

A while back I commented on my experience of Meteor, the third mobile provider to enter the Irish market. Their initial poor coverage had kept their user base quite low but this improved over time and their seriously good offers tempted me to switch to them almost two years ago now. My one issue with their service was how they provided the free online texts. Seeing as every mobile network provider offers a bundle of free online texts, it’s a given that Meteor do this too lest you might think me ungrateful to Meteor for this. I was unhappy with the service mainly because of how the phonebook operated. My first gripe was that you had to go to a different page, select a user and then click back to the text page. Far too much clicking in my opinion. Also, you were not given an option to auto-save the SMS destination number entered when sending a text. I’m happy to say that both these have been addressed with a shiny new Free Text page arriving quietly and unannounced a week or two ago.

Thanks Meteor!

Now, onto my next issue.

Meteor recently stopped the last call info service that could be accessed by dialling *#101#. This was a very handy feature that Meteor actually pre-loaded into their phones. I’m not sure why they stopped it but I primarily used it to
work out if somebody was on Meteor as I have cheaper calls to Meteor mobiles. Now that number portability allows people to hold onto their old numbers when they switch network, you cannot know what network somebody is on. If it’s a case of reducing the traffic on this free service, I now have to check my balance before a call with *#100# and once again after making the call. You can still call 1742 to check your balance but that’s too much bother to be honest. Does anybody know why they got rid of this service?

And finally, an idea for Meteor, or any other mobile provider out there. I’d love to have a widget on my site in the sidebar which when I’m signed in would allow me to use the free text service above. For everybody else who visits the site, the widget would just be an ad stating that I use Meteor. In these days of network alliances and mobile networks such as Vodafone and O2 being available in many countries, not to mind enticing future roaming customers onto your network by propagating your brand around the world, surely this would be a nice free (?) platform to advertise on.

Donal