Tata Docomo sent some shivers to the ‘established’ GSM operators when they launched 1paisa per second calling and now they’re trying to attempt the same by announcing diet-sms that charges 1paisa per character excluding the spaces. Sounds too good to be true, right? In fact, it is but there are a few things to note before you jump with joy.
Firstly, as the “Diet-sms” name implies, this service is useful for short messages. Very short messages. A person’s diet message is capped to just 15 characters, which means the maximum a person can be charged for a diet-sms is 15 paise.
A Tata Docomo user cannot send an under 15 character message and infer that he’ll be charged on the diet-sms rates. He needs to send it to a special short code number that transcribes the text and then sends it to the recipient. I’m not sure how Tata DoCoMo handles this but if there are a lot of messages waiting to be transcribed, your message maybe queued up that could cause a delay.
A user can send a diet-sms via three ways:
Go to the SIM-based menu on the phone (called Dive-in Now), scroll to the diet-sms option under the English Language menu, open it and send the SMS; or
TATA DOCOMO has also launched a phone application which can be downloaded from TATA DOCOMO ‘Dive In’ wap portal, or by simply sending a SMS “diet” to 54321. Using this diet-sms application, the customer can send short text messages easily; or
TATA DOCOMO customers can also send a diet-sms using the normal SMS menu. They need to type the mobile number followed by a space followed by the message and sms this to the short code 52208
We Say: It’s a good concept and it will be interesting to see how other operators take it up. The most intriguing part I felt is that Tata is offering different ways to send a shorter short message, off which the standalone application holds true potential. Tata can easily plaster ads on the app, give them free diet-texts every day and they’ll be more than happy to view the ads. In fact, this is how SMS 2.0 of Airtel should’ve been. But hey, that’s a story for another day.
If you are using the diet-sms feature, do let us know in the comments.
My head is spinning…and I am a technically evolved person….The idea is promising but I wish it were a little easier to comprehend.
Hey,
I read this today in Business Line news paper and thought what crap this was coz you had to type the mobile no. of the recipient and then the message and then send. All this for saving a few paise?
Well, I see that there are other options to use Diet SMS. Now, it’s worth considering. Thanks.