The James Kilgour BlogA Life Blog.

Blyk is a new phenomenon in the mobile world. Not only do they offer completely free texts (217 a month!), but also 43 minutes of anytime, any network calls.

Halt! What’s the catch? Advertising. Every day, they send you up to 6 ad messages to your phone, 70% of which your phone has to receive by being on. Also, the service is only available for those out there who are  between 16-24, living full time in the UK.

I’ve been using the service as my secondary phone for the past few months. I must say, actually the service is pretty decent. On average, I usually only get 2-3 ad texts a day, and there generally quite interesting. Just the other day, I got a free track download onto my phone from Alphabeat’s latest album, and last week I even got a free bottle of Lucozade using a voucher in an ad. There aren’t coverage problems either, as Blyk is powered by the expansive Orange network. For the amount of free texts and calls, the service is actually quite a good one.

The only real difficulty I’ve had was a month ago, when their text servers went down for two days, leaving me and thousands of other users unable to send messages. However, the Blyk team did post updates on their forum, and they allowed us to send free MMS messages instead for the weekend.

I’d definitely recommend it to any one out there who could do with lowering their phone bills; it just makes me wonder how the other networks can’t lower their prices.

JK