Thought I would start a new thread - since i'm responsible for the other two on "Yackie"<G>

Had my Yackie card for a couple days, and could make out going calls both on a new phone (direct dialed, almost instant call back) and an old phone where I had to menu dial (no problem, just a few key presses on the phone to get to the menu).
Newer phone - quad band Moto V330 Older phone: SEr520m (tri-band)

Now incoming is fine. Glitch in assigning me a local 510 number. (Originally SIM was assigned a number fm. the original Ohio number pool.)

I haven't used it outside the U.S. It does access both T-Mobile and Cingular here.

Voice quality on outgoing was very good on the couple test calls. Incoming does not seem quite that good - would rate it just "fair". There seems to be a delay-which is minimal.
One point that may create a problem for callers - there seems to be a 10 to 15 second delay before the caller hears a "ringing" tone. Once the caller hears the ringing tone, it takes about 2 rings before the Yackie phone actually starts ringing.

My fear is that callers might hang up after 10 or 15 seconds of dead air.

I will do further testing this evening. VM etc. And, maybe, a few more test calls. You do get an immediate SMS after someone calls and you didn't answer informing you that they didn't leave a message. It gives you the ID of the caller. IOW, the system does pass ID on incoming.

more later.

...mike

YES!!! :thumbup: Good news.

BTW, how did you resolve the number assignment problem? Email, phone call? How quickly was it resolved?

Have you tried SMS sending/receiving to an Israeli "real" SIM number? And, have tried calling that number directly - is it really blocked for incoming calls?

Thats the same here with the "o2 Genion" product. Where you get a virtual landline-number attached to your sim-card. It also takes up to 15 seconds before it rings. So also the "big players" have the same problems like yackie here.

Chris

They should program their server to play something after three or four seconds without a connection like, "Please hold while the mobile customer you have dialed is located."

The question is if they could put on such a announcement without picking up the call and make the caller pay for the text.... o2 could do as they are they run their own network - but yackie?

Chris

Voicestick uses a similar feature with their call forwarding.

without charging the caller?

They would need their own SS7 infrastructure on the TDM end to do that.

I would bet that when you call in to the Yackie number, that you are indeed paying for the call during that 10-15 seconds of dead air.

Exactly as I tought. Outgoing (using native origination) works well. Incoming has delay and the quality is not the best.

I think I'll wait until they release native numbering.

We can easily test that. Is anyone willing to PM me their Yackie number?

I think the number assignment to a local Oakland, Ca. number caused a minor hold-up. When I first signed up, local numbers were not an option on the web site ordering menu. I was assigned one of the original Ohio numbers.
I could make outgoing, but not get incoming. A day or two later got set up properly w. my local number and all works fine.
Won't have time to "play with it" til the weekend.

...mike

BUT - if you have a local number from Yackie - the caller (assuming he is also local) isn't paying anything extra.

...mike

What is "native numbering"?

I would pay for the added expense of having a non-local number if it meant increased quality.

...mike

I sent you a PM.

Agreed. That's what makes YM potentially so special! Forwarding my local cell phone to YM's service, at no more expense to me than local cellular minutes, makes me drool!

However if I was to give the YM number to someone and they called from an area that's not local, I bet that call starts charging as soon as the call starts processing..

Follow-up to my question to VladS about "native numbering".

I am guessing the "native number" would be the Israeli mobile number keyed to the SIM card? If so, to call an Israeli mobile via most discount services is under 10?/min. Via VoiceStick it is 6.22?.
I would be willing to pay that extra 7 to 8? for a "regular" quality incoming call. Actually, if I weren't assigned a "local" number I would assume that would save Yackie some nominal amount of money.

IOW, I would pay 30?/min. for incoming calls of "normal quality" in the dozens of countries Yackie is charging 24?. If they are going after the high-end market of business people who rack up lots of charges - quality means more to them then cost.

...mike

I would like someone here help me put my Yackie Card thru some tests so we both can report back.
PM me w. your phone number. (Or PM me and I'll send you my number - don't want to post it publically). I am on the Pacific Coast of the U.S. (GMT -8 or -9)

I had left a msg. for VladS - but haven't heard from him yet.

...mike

Did you ever find someone to do this? If not, let me know.

Test report VA to snidely....

Using MCI calling card, snidely and I had a nice converstaion. Delay in dialing when I dialed - hard to guess, may 5 - 15 seconds. Never can tell will these calling cards. Then I was told CONNECTING (foreign accentet female voice) followed by a longish European type toot, repeat three or four time.... S picked up. Soudn quality was very decent.

He called me; I answered. At first the quality was markedly worse than my call to him. He said I was breaking up. As we talked a bit, the quality improved, apparently on both ends.

I sent him an SMS; I am guessing that went thru.

Snidely will report on his view.

Hope this helps.

Stan

My review:

Incoming call, about 3 min., was surprisingly good quality. Not landline quality, but pretty damn good. If it is this good most of the time - Yackie will be excellent to use. System passed ID of originating phone.

Outgoing - about 2 min. was not as good as two very short test calls I made a few days ago. Voices broke up a little - but after 30 seconds quality did seem to improve. Since outgoing calls are twice as expensive - if you know the call will be more than a minute or two, you should have the party call you back.

There is a long period of dead air (10-15 seconds) when calling the Yackie number. They seem to have now installed a recording asking you to wait while the call is being conneccted - BUT - the recording doesn't kick in until after 10 seconds of dead air.


Voice mail - The default recording says something like "you have reached number xxx (numbers have no relationship to anything) please leave a message". Very easy to put in a personal greeting. VM pickup and prompts were landline like quality.
Important feature: If someone calls and doesn't leave a msg., you get an SMS in a few seconds saying "call recvd. fm. number xxx, no msg. left". If a msg is left, the SMS will say "call recvd. fm. number xxx, dial *151 to listen".
This feature saves you the expense of listening to the msg. before calling!
I assume there is no way of accessing VM other than via the Yackie phone.


SMS: Test msg. to/fm. my U.S. T-Mobile phone went thru in just 2-5 seconds.

The only way I found out the Israeli number which is needed to send an SMS to the Yackie phone - was to send an outgoing SMS to my T-M phone. It displayed the Israeli number on the incoming SMS. (If you try voice calling that 972 Israeli number you get a recording that says "the number you have dialed is not connected".)

My Yackie SIM is presently in an SE r520m tri-band phone that requires I menu dial outgoing calls. That was/is no problem what-so-ever. Direct dialing fm. my Moto V330 worked well last Monday.

When you get the callback on outgoing calls (delay 5 to 10 seconds), the caller shows as "unknown". You then get a voice saying something like "please hold while your call is connected and you hear a ringing tone". On the test call this AM, it was picked up by Stan so fast it was before the recording finshed.

Would be glad to run any other tests members here suggest.

...mike

I received my sim today. Nothing else came with it...Just a letter indicating my number. Here is my observation:

I actually talked to Mike Thaler "snidely" . Just to verify that we were experiencing the same issues.

I made a couple of test calls incoming and outgoing using my Nokia 3120 (will test the V551 later). The call quality was fine. I dialed directly. I did not have to use menu dialing. The caller ID was not passed on the incoming call (I called with 3 different phones mobiles and land line) . I know it's not guaranteed to show the caller's ID. Well.... I did get the missed call SMS showing the number of the caller though, if caller did not leave a message. How come this shows the caller's number but thhe caller ID does not, I don't know. The callback came quickly without any problems when making outgoing calls. There is a system message that says "connecting" while someone is trying to call the number. I heard the ring the same time it sounded on the phone I was calling. So, no lag time there.

The VM comes on after about 8 rings or so, this can probably be changed. There is no way to check the balance from the phone. I asked that question in the other thread visited by Cizake. And, Cizake said we could do it. Well, maybe it's not implemented yet or there is a code that we need to dial. I think it's important to be able to check the balance from the phone though.

SMS was delivered in a few seconds. Sent to my sprintpcs and tmobile payg phones.

I discussed this with snidely. Neither of us can logon to the website to do anything. We can't access account information or anything. The only available options is to change password/username. You click anything else, you get a blank screen. So, at the moment there is no way to check balance or topup.

So, some things that would really make this sim competitive: The ability to be able to check balance and topup via the phone. I hope the non-showing of caller ID is just carrier dependent and not an issue with the sim.

BTW, I was roaming on tmobile when I did these tests.

I got my SIM-card today as well.

Here is my short test report:

1) SMS: works fine and very fast back and forth. I was connected with Vodafone DE and sent SMS to o2 and the other way round

2) outgoing call: prompt connection, audio quality like any other GSM call.

3) incoming call: when dialing the us-number assigned to the card it picks up immediately and says "connecting" while trying to reach the phone. So always a charged call for the caller even if noone picks up.
But the big problem is: I could not hear myself on the Yackie-side! Just one way works. I tried with the state phone company (T-com) as well with a cheap one. Same result.
Did anybody else experieced this problem before? I hope it was just a temporary problem and i will try again later today.

Chris

On the first incoming call, I could hardly hear myself on the yackie side. I believe it was because I was in my basement where 3120 barely has signal. On the second call I went upstairs and heard clearly on the yackie side.

Was caller ID passed on the incoming call. The missed call sms alert does always show the number, but the phone itself just always show "unknown" on the incoming call.

I just had chat with the helpline about not being able to do anything on the website at all. They do not have an idea of when that will be fixed. She did say they are working ion it though.

Cizake is probably the best person to communicate with. the help line are just there to take issues and forward to the appropriate person/dept.

I'm still in the company and we have all 4 avilable networks end-scale here. So that shouldnt be the problem.

Caller ID was not transmitted on both calls - our companies switchboard sends it 100% though.

Well, lets see what the next tests will show.

Did anybody find out already how to see the remaining balance of the card? There are a lot of codes stored on the card starting with Ambulance and ending with Service but there's no balance check as it seems :meh:

Chris

As for the balance, the lady I chatted with said it can only be done from the web. In the other thread, I asked, and Cizake said it could be done from the phone. They need to let us know what the code is then.

There are no codes stored on my sim. The only things I see in the sim menu are:

1. Services. This has support, voice menu and voice mail options
2. Langiage. This has about 6 languages or so
3. Menu on/off
4. Dialled calls.

Excerpt from the user guide, there is a paragraph that mentions callerID may need to be activated. I do not understand that. Here it is...

Incoming Call:
There are two options to receive calls:
Via land line
Via your homeland GSM by using "divert calls" feature from your land line number.
When the phone rings, answer it normally by pressing "send."
When caller ID is activated, press #1 to receive the call.
To activate caller ID service, contact Yackie Mobile Support: *606 From Yackie Mobile SIM.

I did not look in the SIM-Menu.
I looked in the phonebooks on the SIM.
There is one with "Services".
Ambulance
Emergency
Finance
Fire Dept.
Police
Roaming
Service

(all numbers for the local israeli network i guess - police for example is 100)

The SIM menu is as you described.

Chris

The only entry stored on my sim is the one I will really need voicemail +972544151000. The should probably be the same for all the sims.

I called it from the phone and when I answered the call, I first heard a message in another language (probably Hebrew). I was about to hangup, then the announcement in english came.... Welcome to Orange voicemail, asked for the phone number, etc.

update: Still have just one way audio on incoming calls.
Talked with the customer hotline and they sent a report to the tech dept.
They promised sending me an email when they checked the issue.

keep you updated here...

Chris

I consider this a major issue. i.e. The basic functionality is not working. It's very unlikely that you will hear anything back from the helpline or technical folks. If it's so, you may want to contact Cizake to see if he can escalate it.

I emailed Cizake and got a reply within 5 minutes with a copy of the tech ticket that is open and in the pipeline. So it seems the support works smooth. Thats a good sign B)

He said that there were still problems with the DID allocation. Thats why i also got a slightly different phone number than the one i actually ordered.

They are testing right now, just got a email from the tech support to switch on my phone for test calls.

also found out that the voice mail works as i got 2 unanwered calls from the tech supp alrady while the phone was switched off ;)


EDIT/UPDATE: got several calls from yackie tech supp already. Now its already 2 way communication and voice quality also improved. They'll call again when they close the ticket. :clap:

Chris

I also received my SIM yesterday. I only played around with it a bit last night. I used it in two older tri-band phones. One is SonyEricsson T68 and another is Samsung s200. I am located in California and we have 2 choices for GSM network (the older T-Mobile/pre-meger Cingular and the newer AT&T/post-merger Cingular). Both networks are GSM 1900. I could register and activate with both networks without any problems.

Both phones have no problem receiving incoming calls. I found that the delay between calling my Ohio DID (using a regular landline) and my cellphone actually ringing is really negligible. Most of the time the cellphone rang before the first "connecting to the mobile phone" message is completed. As other people have noted, people calling the DID will get charged the first minute even if we don't pickup the phone. I double checked that with a regular prepaid calling card. The caller (me) got charged 1 minute even when I hang up before reaching the voice mail.

I had a bit more trouble making phone calls. Neither of my older phones wanted to dial out using the "non-menu" method. AT&T's network would just give me a fast beep if I try to dial the number directly. T-Mobile network would give me an error message, saying something to the effect of "error message 10, SDG 05". I also had a hard time initially trying to find the "menu" method of calling out. For whatever reason, my Samsung does not list the "Call To" menu option by default. It took me a while until I figured out that I had to choose "Menu On/Off" to "On" before that option would show up. My SonyEricsson does not have this problem. After I figured that out, making phone calls is quick and easy. The call back usually happens within 2-3 seconds.

I really didn't have the chance to check out the voicemail system. I didn't have a good chance to check the voice quality either (didn't really want to talk to myself :P ).

The original purpose of the Yackie card was for my wife to use on her business trip at Singapore. Unfortunately the SIM arrived about a week late. She ended up buying a local SIM. I think I'll write a quick review of that on the appropriate forum.

I'll be looking forward to reading it.

UPDATE ON MY YACKIE SERVICE

I had my Yackie SIM about 3 weeks before others here got theirs last week. My review is earlier in this thread or in another Yackie thread here.

I can now see the reason they delayed shipment to others. They just sent me the same "new and improved" SIM others recvd. a few days ago. Mine was logged into the UPS system in Israel (Il) on Thurs. 7/20, exported fm. Il on 7/21, logged into Ky in the U.S. 7/23 - and delivered to me on Monday morning (7/24)! Amazing!

Calls now go thru in a few seconds. No more 15 seconds of dead air. A caller immediately hears both a voice saying "we are connecting your call" and a "virtual ringing". The Yackie phone itself starts ringing within about 5 seconds or so. Voice quality seems excellent on the couple of test calls i had made to the Yackie phone.

Outgoing, as before, is quick and painless.

I should mention that all test calls were to/from U.S.

...mike

NOW, the only thing left for Yackie to do is get the web site up and running.

For those of you that have tested this sim, can you let me know your observations regarding these 3 questions?

1. Did the caller's ID show up on incoming calls? It never does for me.
2. Do you get a Voicemail notification/SMS when you have a VM waiting? Obviously we should, but it does not work for me. I never get any notification.
3. For callers that reach your VM (with phone on or off), do you get an SMS alert notification similar to the missed call alert? i.e That tells you that the call was missed but message was left. I do not get anything.

I just want to know if my observations are the same with everyone else, or is it my sim that could be the issue.

Got mine...no caller ID but got a sms that I had missed a call who did not leave a voicemail message which had the number...odd.

I get the VM info messages every time. But always showing "message from: unknown.."
I did not see any caller ID yet - only in the list of calls that i got by email from yackie after they made some tests with my card.

BUT: I still have one way audio for incoming calls. I emailed cizake again and he opened the tech. tickets again yesterday. Interesting is: The test call that i got from yackie last week worked fine. But when i try myself afterwards it didnt work anymore. I'm wondering what's cooking here.

Chris

I think Yackie has promise in terms of features and call cost, but I'll hold off on getting a Yackie card until they have the voicemail bugs worked out, data capability is added (I think a post said this fall), and I can get a glitch free Connecticut incoming line. :construction: Until then, I'll stick with United Mobile, Iridium and low tech (and low cost) prepaid calling cards when I'm outside the USA (Cingular or Nextel) and Canada (Fido). B)

New Upgrade from me...

Today i got about 10 calls for testing from yackie tech support. I talked some time with the technician and he told me that there are still some problems with the caller ID tranmission from certain countries but in general its implemented and running.

I got a new DID number today replacing the 1-567 number with a 1-419. Now i have 2-way communication with a good audio quality on incoming calls.

I suppose the charges will be refunded again like with the first test calls - but i cant say 100% sure yet as we all know there is no balance check running yet.

Now i am fighting to get a quad band phone in time as the one i originally ordered is still out of stock. What do u think? Moto Razr V3 or Slvr L7? Or a fancy looking one from a unknown asian manufacturer? (see item no 120012607271 on eb@y)

Chris

How does someone email this "Cizake"? I'm still waiting for my first card, it's been about 28 days (since they've debited my account). Phone Support goes to voice mail and emails to support are not answered...