hitoori.com

...them hotfoot it over to Hitoori.com and sign up! Their tagline is ‘Hitoori puts you back in control’, and from what I have seen it seems to do just that.

Hitoori operates a standard package that costs you nothing and a premium package that you pay for on your credit or debit card. I’ll start with the Standard Package, which for the time being is the one I am using.

THE STANDARD PACKAGE:

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...get given a ‘mobile’ phone number and an email address; all the communications that you receive on this number can be picked up when you want via the website, or alternatively you can phone your own Hitoori number, access your account and listen to all of your messages.

You can listen to faxes and emails through your phone!! Or you can listen to your voicemail messages from the site!! Whoever you give this number out to ... more

Do you know people that have an email address, a mobile phone, a pager and a fax machine and you still can never get hold of them? Do you have all of the above and seem to be constantly at everyone’s beck and call? Well why don’t you and them hotfoot it over to Hitoori.com and sign up! Their tagline is ‘Hitoori puts you back in control’, and from what I have seen it seems to do just that.

Hitoori operates a standard package that costs you nothing and a premium package that you pay for on your credit or debit card. I’ll start with the Standard Package, which for the time being is the one I am using.

THE STANDARD PACKAGE:

You can sign up for this freebie service and you get given a ‘mobile’ phone number and an email address; all the communications that you receive on this number can be picked up when you want via the website, or alternatively you can phone your own Hitoori number, access your account and listen to all of your messages.

You can listen to faxes and emails through your phone!! Or you can listen to your voicemail messages from the site!! Whoever you give this number out to will only have to remember this one number because it can take all your messages from whatever source, be it a paper fax or a verbal message.

The Message Centre that your number has can also collect email from other accounts, so if you wanted you could use this one number for pretty much everything. You can set your personal profile so that when anybody calls it is routed to another phone number or you can just have all you Hitoori calls sent straight to your Message Centre. If you decide to use this one number you can also set how long Hitoori tries to contact you before it redirects them to the Message Centre, you can also have them try up to three phones in a row before taking a message. You can edit you profile as much as you want and can differentiate between your working week and the weekend.

The standard package also offers a black and white list facility, which means if somebody is bugging you and you don’t want to talk to them then you can add them to your black list and all of their calls are diverted straight to the Message Centre without being re-routed to your personal phone first. The White list works the opposite of the black one, if you have somebody very important to you, then you can add them to the White list and only people on you white list will get re-routed to your personal phone, all other callers will be sent directly to the Message Centre.

I think that the nice thing about Hitoori is that if you don’t have a mobile phone or a landline number, I.E. you may live with your parents, as long as you have Internet access you can still get phone messages and listen to them. You can record a personalised message that callers will hear when they leave a message and you can do this by phoning you Hitoori number and tapping in you PIN number.

If you are on the move and do not a mobile number then you can still access your Message Centre by using the Hitoori low cost number and entering your Hitoori mobile number along with your personal PIN.

Soon to launch is an Instant Messaging service, but as of this opinion a start date hasn’t been announced.

The standard package allows you to store 5MB worth of information, and does warn that if you go over this then messages may be permanently deleted. I’m not really sure how many message 5MB would contain, but I imagine that if you regularly check your account then it shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and if you are going to use it more then to either pay to get extra space or upgrade to the premium package…speaking of which!

THE PREMIUM PACKAGE:

Of course this package has all the Standard Package amenities, along with the other stuff that you have to pay for.
There is a monthly charge with this package, which is £4.95 ex. VAT, this is on top of any other charges they make for the services that you use. All of these charges are sent to you via an electronic bill monthly, and on reading the terms and conditions they do warn that you will be charged a % for any late payments.

Send SMS messages to any mobile phone in the world at a cost of only 5p per message, which comparing to the BT, P.A.Y.G rate of 10p per message, is quite a bit cheaper.

Create and send faxes to any fax machine worldwide. The site does not state exactly how much the cost of this service is, only saying that it is 75% cheaper than the BT standard rate to send one!!!

There is only so much I can tell you about the premium service because this is not the service that I use, but other stuff that you can do is send an email as a speech message to any mobile or landline phone, create and send a voice recording as an email attachment, be notified when any message type id received in your Message Centre and redirect voice messages to any other telephone. I don’t want it to seem that I am just skimming over this bit, but I didn’t want to just make a load of stuff up…I have a reputation to keep you know…NOT!!!

There will soon be available the ability to send Video Mail from your Hitoori number as well, but a launch date hasn’t been announced as yet.

OTHER STUFF:

Call charges:

To call your Hitoori mobile number the charges are 32p per minute Peak rate, 21p per minute Off Peak and 10.5p per minute at Weekends. Apparently they are trying to reduce these rates but if you consider that somebody may try and phone you at home, on your mobile and at work this could work out to be quite cheap.

The big savings that your friends and family can receive are if you travel around the world a lot because with the Hitoori number you pay the UK charge rate and not the international rate, which for some countries can be huge. All rates are exclusive of VAT. The call charges if you are using a mobile are not listed on the site, and Hitoori claim that this is because all the service providers have different call charges, because of this they do list the numbers for Orange, BT etc, so you can call them and ask.
Hitoori cannot also list the costs from International phones, because again this varies considerably, but they do recommend phoning the International Operator and asking.

If you have any problems then you can phone the free phone support number or email them, I haven’t had to do either as yet so do not know how prompt this service is.

I would definitely recommend reading the terms and conditions, but rather than trying to read them in the tiny box that they are contained in, copy and paste them into Word. I did this for the purpose of this opinion and was amazed that they cover nearly 9 A4 pages!!! A lot of the T & C’s is fairly basic stuff, but as there is so much of it I would really rather that you read them yourself than putting bits here that may be misconstrued and end up with me getting sued!!
Just one little thing that I will add though is that if you sign up and then decide that you really don’t want to use Hitoori after all, don’t worry, If you don’t use your account for 2 months then your Message Centre becomes inactive, which means you cannot receive any communications until you log in again, if 30 days after the initial two months you still haven’t used your account, it is deleted, and you never have to hear the word Hitoori again.

If you are a Webrewards member then you can also collect rewards for the amount of traffic your Hitoori number has, at present it is 1 reward for every 5 minutes worth of calls, not great but better than a slap round the face with a wet kipper!

Hitoori are owned and operated by ABS Telecom PLC, and through this company you can get free Internet access.

If you are desperate to hear what your friends at Ciao sound like then give them your Hitoori number and let them leave a message, it really is good fun listening to them!

The site itself is easy on the eyes and once you have visited a couple of times is really easy to navigate.

If you sign up at the minute then you can apply to get 50 professional looking business cards made up for free, you don’t even have to pay postage and packing, of course the telephone number on them is you Hitoori one, but then if you plan on using it…who cares!

The first of two apologies if you have got this far without falling asleep.

Sorry for the length of this opinion, but having written it in Word I can only say that at least it is 6 pages shorter than Hitoori’s Terms and Conditions.

I promise never to use the words Hitoori, number, Message, Centre or package again…ever!!!
 

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