Monday, January 07, 2008

Cheap International Calls with your Cell Phone

We used to go to church with a family who had a couple of sons that were a bit older than our kids. Now those boys are grown up, and the oldest travels a lot. He spent some time teaching English in Japan. Then he took some time off and traveled through Australia and quite a few other countries. He keeps a pretty good blog on MySpace, and I really enjoy reading it and hearing about his experiences in all these places I know I'll never see. Right now he's in Taiwan teaching English again.

Keeping up with him via his blog is good enough for me, because he's not my son. However, this morning I started thinking about how hard it must be for his parents to keep in touch. If my kids grow up and decide to travel the world, I'd like to be able to call them once in a while just to see how they're doing. Since international calling rates can be quite high, I was thinking that would cost a pretty penny. Then I read about Packet8's MobileTalk. It allows you to make cheap international calls using your cell phone. It's quite simple really:
  1. Sign up for an account.
  2. Download the MobileTalk application to your phone.
  3. Make calls as always. Every time you make an international call, the MobileTalk application automatically routes the call through the Packet8 network - meaning you will not pay the international call rates of your cell provider.
There are no calling cards to carry or PINs to remember, just a monthly fee for unlimited access. Imagine - 2¢ per minute to the U.K. and 3¢ per minute to Australia, to name a few. That's a huge savings over the rates quoted from the cell phone providers. Please note that these rates are for calls from the U.S. to other countries.

I made a video for MobileTalk by Packet8. I tried to be creative. I took some video of myself talking about it, but I didn't like the way I looked, and I'm not that good at video editing! Still, the video tells a little about the MobileTalk service and why it can be very useful.


The best videos will be voted on by Yahoo's Bix community, and the winner gets a MacBook, an iPhone, and an iPod - how cool is that? 1o runners up will win a $10 Starbucks gift card. Visit and vote.

1 comment:

  1. I hope you win this one! Heads or Tails is up if you wanna do your post. :o)

    ReplyDelete

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