In a free text panic last summer I registered for mtnsms. I found it through a search engine and used it a few times, it was handy. I was on holiday in the summer and popped into an Internet cafe to catch up on my email. There on the desktop I spotted a familiar icon... mtnsms. The cafe used Internet Explorer and there was no facility to log directly into AOL so I decided I’d send some free texts to friend’s back home using my old pal.
Basically mtnsms.com is a website for sending free text - yup free text messages. A few adverts on the homepage allow this to happen. They’re small and unobtrusive – no pop-ups! :-)
Firstly you have to register! In the olden days this was easy peasy, but at the moment the register link takes you to a partner site, so you register there and then have to work your way back to the mtnsms site before you can access you’re account. It’s not difficult, but it’s a little tedious to say the least.
The concept is very straight forward – you join, you send free text. But there IS a little more to this site! You can create a list of your friends, so that when you go to send your message you just select their name from the drop down list rather than trying to remember all your mates numbers or fiddling with your phone book! You can also pop them on a touch database. To be honest this doesn’t have any real function! You select how often you text your mate and when you’re on the site a black arrow appears next to their name to remind you to text them – as if you’d forget!
To send your text you select smsXpress from the menu at the bottom of the page, choose your mates name or pop the number in straight off. The character limit is fairly reasonable at 123 per message.
You can also choose a message ending to suit yourself.
Once your message has sent your are presented with a page which allows you to opt to send another or track the message has sent. If you choose to track it your are taken to your outbox, where the last 20 messages you have sent are stored. Next to each message there is a coloured blob and a note to tell you it’s status. The green blob denotes received, the mustard blob shows sent and the annoying burgundy blob shows it has not been sent. Occasionally messages are not sent or not received. This is due to one of two factors, the message has expired, this occurs after seven days, so maybe they left their phone turned off for ages. The other reason is allegedly an invalid mobile format, god knows what this means, I have emailed the site to ask but haven’t yet had a reply.
A wonderful little facility is your inbox! Message receivers can reply to the number you sent from e.g. your personal mtnsms number and the message will go into your inbox on the website. Very useful!
There are also a few forums where text addicts can chat and leave messages for each other – oh wow!
The site is a little basic and bright (a stunning canary yellow – not good when your hungover!) but it’s easy to navigate and use... and after all it is free so who am I to complain?
There is 5 text a day limit now, which is a bit of a pain now so I am more inclined to use genie for my pc to mobile texts. Genie texts give you the sender’s number to reply to the message but then it’s a bit fiddly, whereas with mtnsms you can reply straight away and the message will go into the senders inbox. Plus there is the added bonus of the delivery status with mtnsms. However, at the end of the day it comes down to reliability rather than all these extra niceties.