Stu:

It works great in Canada.

Hi Kupe,

You can't currently access mobile voice mail remotely unfortunately. This is something we have in the development pipeline. It will be provided as part of the ekit travel journal functionality. The travel journal is currently provided free to all ekit SIM users. Essentially the service automatically maps your travels on a google map using cell tower locations used by your SIM. The travel journal has strong privacy settings (private, family & friends, public), and can be switched off. For those wishing to use it, you can provide a password to family and friends, they can see where you are, the local time and weather, if your mobile is on or off, send you a text or call you, you can do text updates to the journal, upload photos, etc and family and freinds can share in your travel experience.

One of the feature we'll integrate into the travel journal is the ability to pick up your voice mail via the travel journal website. You will login with your password, will see a record of your trip, and in addition to seeing comments and messages to the journal from family and friends, you will also be able to play voice mail messages through the PC for free.

If you haven't had an opportunity to review the travel journal, I'd recommend it - there is a demo on the website.

Please let me know if you have any more questions.

Regards,

John

Hi Stu,

The service uses normal calling (straight through dialling) in the USA and in Canada.

John

I'm glad you're happy with the service. An early batch of SIMs had the pre-programmed shortcodes incorrectly stored in the US profile. This has since been rectified, and will work as expected with newer SIMs. Apologies for the inconvenience. Thanks for the feedback.

John

I just ordered one this morning and will report back.

Will we be able to set up auto recharge in the near future from a preverified credit card?

Stu

I have checked again this morning telestial website for ekit US Passport rates and found out that again they have a bunch of countries with free incoming in addition to EU and US, like Brazil Algeria Chile Australia Bahrain. Can JD confirm a firm list of free incoming calls countries?


Passport US SIM Card by Telestial

As far as I can see you can do it right now. The auto-recharge amounts are $30/50/100 and the trigger level is $5/10/20/50.

John-

It sounds like the eKit I just got from Telestial is one of the older ones- i.e. the pre-programmed shortcodes don't work in US mode. Is this something we can manually reprogram, or will we need to workaround by manually dialing?

Thanks!

Kupe

Kupe:

Set your phone to U.S. mode and just dial 187. You will get a text message soon with the balance. If that works you really don't need the prefix dialing *126* .

On my EKIT SIM, the Easy Dial number contacts on the SIM work in Global mode. I have a contact that says: Account Baance *126*187# .This is how to check your account balance in global mode when you are in Europe. For the U.S. just use, 187, 191, 154, etc.

Does anyone else get strange text messages if they leave their phone on global mode while in the US? The texts consist of some random characters ($, », and @) interspersed between a bunch of big black boxes. It's obviously not a big deal because it doesn't affect the function in any way, but I'm just curious if I'm the only one getting this.