There used to be a time that with your GSM phone, there were still a few places where it won’t work. I remember a few years back, your GSM phone would be ok in most parts of Asia and Europe, but would not be useful in the United States, Japan and Korea.
That has mostly changed now. United States now has two GSM providers, T-Mobile and Cingular. You can use your GSM phone now in Japan if you have 3G. IN Korea, you can use your SIM Card, and thus retain your number, but you have to rent a special phone since Korea’s 3G is the CDMA standard. However, pretty much anywhere around the world, you can probably bring your SIM and people will be able to reach you at your cell phone number.
So we are happy thinking as the cell phone rates go down, and the plans get cheaper, we also get more roaming. But the roaming charges are going through the roof. In the last visit to the United States, I just found out how much. When I used Tmobile, I had to pay 110 pesos per minute ( plus VAT) to call the Philippines! Per text, it was 15 pesos. When I used Cingular ( now AT&T Wireless I think), it was worse. I had to pay 150 pesos to call overseas, and it was 25 pesos per text. There was one instant when I used my roaming phone to call my wife’s phone who was just a few hundred meters away. We talked for a few seconds just to know where she was, and I was charged 150 pesos, and she too! So that conversation costs us almost 300 pesos!
All along, I also thought that when you are roaming, and you call a local number, it was affordable. Not anymore. I used the cell phone to call my friend in the same city, and I was charged almost 80 pesos per minute. There was a time when you don’t want to touch the hotel local phone number, because it was so expensive. Relatively speaking, maybe it is now the cheaper alternative.
I am sure many of you who have brought along your phone overseas has been shocked by the prices. Maybe if you are staying longer, the best way is really to buy a local SIM. Or the way to get in touch is really just to bring along your notebook, log into some free Wifi Hotspots, and check your email. And probably use Chikka to text out. Or use Messenger to chat. One good tool I found out is to use Skype to text out to cell numbers in the Philippines which costs less than 10 cents per text.
Which incidentally brings us to the point that Hotmail, the first original and popular free email service is now sporting a new look and officially called now Windows Live Hotmail. Hotmail has gone a long way when it was offered in the 90s. I remembered using it, and only having 2 megabyte of free disk space. Now, it comes now with 2 gigabyte space which is a thousand times bigger. Which is as well. Last week, I calculated, and I got about 10 megabytes of email everyday, on average!
The Windows Live Hotmail now looks like the Outlook email program, and allows you now to drag an drop messages into folders. And reading on the latest statistics, it does seem that it continues to be the number 1 email service with more than 280 million users. Yahoo comes second with approximately 81 million. AOL is said to be third with about 47 million while Google Mail, which was introduced with much fanfare and the first one to give 1 gigabyte and later 2 gigabytes ( now almost 3 ) , is reported to have 14 million users.
However, from what I noticed, it does seem that the Philippines differs a lot from the United States in its choices. While Hotmail is leading there, it seems that Yahoo is the favored email service here. Also, while MySpace is enjoying huge popularity in the United States, most people I know here use Friendster as their preferred social networking tool.
Wilson Ng keeps a log of his articles in www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife