What would you say if I were to offer you 5 text messages a day, forever, for the bargain one-off payment of £14.99? This was exactly what Orange were offering a year and a half ago when I got my phone (on Orange Pay as You Go) along with a surprise little black box for Christmas…

This little black box was the home of my ‘Orange Out Here’ pack, one of its contents being a rather cool little black beach bag with the big Orange logo on one side (obviously the side not on show when I’m wearing it…he he) and c u L8r in suitably computerised looking writing (it looks like each letter is formed from little orange squares) on the other side.

Also in the box was a poster with a young man on his own in a city café on one side looking around expectantly and the words ‘where r u?’ in the little orange squarey writing. On the reverse is the girl who he was obviously supposed to be meeting who is, from the picture, clearly somewhere else, possibly somewhere in the country by the looks of the picture. There is also her text-messaged reply to him ‘I’m here’. Needless to say, this poster has remained lying in the little black box gathering dust, but it does serve, in my opinion, to illustrate the advantages of Orange Out Here and text messages in general: a simple and fun way to keep in touch with our nearest and dearest on one hand and on the other a way of avoiding confrontation and a means of saying things that we couldn’t any other way. The other thing included in the box (whose top also featured the boy from the café/ ‘where r u?’ picture) was the all-important instruction booklet.

But before I let you know about the ins and outs of the ‘Orange Out Here’ package, there’s something I need to tell you. Sounds ominous you say? Well it is, because there have been a few changes to ‘Orange Out Here’ since I got it.

So What’s Changed?

Well, instead of the £14.99 one-off payment that I exchanged for my little black box, ‘Orange Out Here’ now costs £19.99 a year. They did also try to cut the package down to three messages a day (at least for their existing customers) when they introduced this new tariff. Fortunately for me though they saw sense (or the threat of possible law suits became apparent to them) because a few days after grumbling about the unfairness of having fewer free texts to send, I was receiving a message from them telling me that I would once again receive 5 free messages a day and roughly 80p would be added to my credit in compensation for missed texts.

So is it a Rip-Off Now, I Hear You Asking?

That is entirely dependent on how many texts you would normally send. A standard Orange text message costs 12p. If you were to send 5 text messages a day for a month then this would cost you cost you roughly 18 pounds a month and in just over a months time you would have recovered the money you spent on ‘Out Here’ in free texts. Now let’s consider the less frequent texter, say someone who sends roughly 1 message a day or 365 texts a year. 365 Orange texts for a Pay as You Go user without ‘Orange Out Here’ (or ‘Text Saver’ as it is now called) would cost that user £43.80, so it would still be well worth that person investing in ‘Text Saver’. If you divide £19.99 by 12p it can be found that the number of texts per year at which it would be worth someone buying ‘Text Saver’ (i.e. at which it would save them money if they bought it) is 167 texts per year. So if you are on Orange Pay as You Go and you send more than 167 texts per year (one every just over two days) then it is still good value for money and worth buying.

Are there any other benefits of ‘Orange Out Here’?

Yes. I got £5 of free Orange talk time when I registered, which theoretically brought my ‘Out Here’ down to a price of £9.99, an unbelievable price for 5 free text messages a day, forever and I am ensured that this is still included with the new ‘Text Saver’ packs. Also, having Orange Out Here allows me free Reserve calls (up to two 30 second calls or 1 one minute call) every time that my talk time has run out (although Orange have now included this with all of their Pay as You Go plans so this is no longer a unique benefit of having ‘Out Here’ and you must top up and then run your balance down to zero again to get your next lot of Reserve calls). I seem to remember that the free talk time had to be used up within a month of registering for ‘Out Here’ but that I topped up before the end of the month and that the remainder of the free £5 that I hadn’t used (I was a good little girly then) did not disappear after the month was over.

Where do I Buy it and How do I Connect to ‘Orange Out Here’/’Text Saver’?

‘Text Saver’ can be bought from the Orange Shop. Connecting is simple. Before you connect you need to be a Pay as You Go Orange Customer and not currently have ‘Orange Group Saver’ active on your phone. In my ‘Orange Out Here’ pack (and in the new ‘Text Saver’ packs) was a cardboard, credit card sized card, attached to the instruction booklet with a sticky pad which I had to pull off and then scratch off the panel on the back of it to reveal a number. I then dialled 450 (you also do this if you have bought a ‘Text Saver’ pack) and selected option 2 (the redeem a voucher option) and followed the instructions they gave (which involved me typing in the number on the back of the card) in order to connect. You then have to wait up to 24 hours for them to send you a SIM update and from that point on, 5 ‘free’ text messages a day are yours…

Any Rules?

You only get 5 free text messages a day when you have credit on your phone. You also can’t use them when you are abroad and they supposedly re-start the day after you get back to the UK having been abroad (although I seem to have found them starting again straight away several times having been abroad in the early hours of the morning and then having arrived in the UK later on in the morning). You can use them for sending picture messages such as those on the Nokia 3330 (although not these new MMS multimedia ones I fancy) although one picture message does use up 3 of your free text messages. The allowance doesn’t roll over, so if you use 1 message one day and then want to send 6 the next, you’ll have to pay for the sixth text message (any messages you send above the 5 free ones are charged at the rate specified by your particular Orange Pay as You Go Plan). And to re-iterate the ‘Reserve Calls’ are limited to 1 call of up to a minute or 2 of up to 30 seconds each every time your balance falls to zero and you supposedly have to use your free £5 talk time within a month of registering for ‘Out Here’ or ‘Text Saver’ (though if you’ve got some left at the end of the month try topping up, you might just be able to keep the remainder of the £5, well it worked for me).

In Conclusion…

This was a very very very good deal (and obviously too good as Orange changed the tariff) when I bought it. It probably took me less than a month to send texts to the value of this package and I’m continuing, a year and a half later, to save money every day by using ‘Orange Out Here’. OK so it’s not quite as good a deal now, but anyone on Orange Pay as You Go who sends at least 167 messages a year (or 125 if you take into account the free talk time received) would be a fool not to buy it. And I have a big smile on my face because there’s a lot of money in my pocket that otherwise would have been in Orange’s…

Not sure about the categories below, they seem to relate more to a phone than to 'Out Here'/'Text Saver' in particular but I've rated them all excellent because I've been so pleased with 'Out Here'.