uboot.com > Reviews > It Works Just Now But It Cant Go Like This Forever

Author's product rating:   

Navigation	Good
Features	Excellent

Advantages:	Free SMS messaging, Easy to use address book, Send msgs to multiple people via UBoot on your mobile
Disadvantages:	They won't exist like this forever, no doubt something will change soon !

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I use UBoot almost every day, and I have to say that it is one of the best SMS sites around.

Available to users in the UK, Austria and Germany (that's if my interpretation of the non-UK country names - given on the site in their respective languages - is correct!), you can send messages to mobile phones for free.

This site beats many others in numerous ways:

Instead of having to type in the mobile number the whole time, you simply choose the recipient from your drop-down address book which is conveniently located at the top of the screen, without having to open other windows and wait for internet explorer crashing while you do it!

For the first time, you can use all 160 characters allowed by sms to write your message. Most sms sites take the last 20 or so characters for themselves and put in a signature file, so you can only type around 140 characters, but UBoot let you use as many characters as you need (although the technical side of sms limits this to 160, as on mobile phones). The only downside to this is that friends may not realise the message is from a website and try to reply... however from some networks, this does work!

If you have a One-2-One phone (which I don't, but that's a different story) recipients can reply to messages, (the reply goes to your Uboot email address), and you can send messages from your One-2-One phone to up to 10 other people, you just type in your msg and the name of the address book group it has to go to, and send it to the UBoot number, dead easy, and great if you're out and about and can't afford 10 msgs to organise something!

The one thing I will say about UBoot is that they seem to still be on their "introductory period" - like most dotcoms, they have venture capital funding to let them survive until they can make a profit. And if they carry on operating as they do presently, they will be bankrupt to the tune of £millions! They say they have nearly 2 million members, imagine each of them sending out one message a day, the cheapest these sites can get it for it about 2p a msg (they do have to pay for it), 4 million pence a day is £40 000 a day operating costs, so they have to come up with some way to offset that.

While I think UBoot is excellent for now, I fear that they will introduce something soon which will detract from the service, to let them pay their bills.... but until then, enjoy!