Vodafone is really generous with its gifts this year. Besides discounts of CZK 2,000 on business phones, discounts of CZK 1,000 on all smartphones and other deals, VF also has unbeatable plans, both data and voice and text, where you never pay a monthly fee and you only commit for 6 months.
Prepaid customers get a little gift too: top up “more than CZK 500” and you get unlimited calls and texts within the VF network free for a week. All the gifts are listed at https://www.vodafone.cz/tarify/ . But I don’t want this to be a promotional piece for VF services, because VF has a gift for users of all networks too.
I want to tell you about a very attractive offer that is all upside; the only downside for some might be that the texts are sent from the internet. So what is this VF Park all about? VF Park is first and foremost a home base for developers. Quoting from 👻 There used to be data here. Now it is just an empty lot on the internet.:
Vodafone Park is a platform that lets users build their own page out of various applications. On a single page they can have articles from their favorite newspapers, a feed from their social network, weather information, a list of emails, and so on. On top of that, Vodafone provides mobile operator services, so applications can send and receive MMS and SMS. The platform is being developed step by step in cooperation between several parties – Vodafone, users and developers. Vodafone supplies the portal with mobile operator services such as an SMS/MMS gateway, SMS/MMS inboxes, call logs and backup of contacts from your mobile phone. Platform users regularly test the functionality, services and design, helping to make the customer experience with Vodafone Park as good as possible. Developers supply their applications.”
When you open VF Park after logging in, you will see a page with 5 tabs:
- Gateway – for sending SMS/MMS. You can send to multiple recipients, and for MMS you can choose from templates.
- Contacts – here you can sync contacts with your phone, import them from your PC, print a contact, or look at deleted contacts.
- Inbox – SMS, MMS and Outgoing calls. SMS and MMS behave a bit oddly (they don’t show the latest text, but one of the latest ones) and they show only that single one, not all of them. I don’t have calls activated, so I don’t know how they work.
- Personal and Vodafone – here you can manage the VF Park applications that the user chooses.
Now let’s talk about the main thing that VF Park offers ordinary users, the reason you came here. With VF Park you can send up to 500 SMS/MMS spread over as much as 3.5 months.
I write SMS/MMS (hereafter just SMS), because it doesn’t matter whether you send 1 SMS and 499 MMS or 20 MMS and 480 SMS. It also depends on when you register (via 👻 This link is now just a memory, just as the blog’s name suggests.):
- users registered between December 16, 2010 and December 31, 2010 have the promo valid until March 31, 2011
- users registered between January 1, 2011 and January 15, 2011 have the promo valid until March 31, 2011
- users registered between January 16, 2011 and January 31, 2011 have the promo valid until April 30, 2011
For 1 month you are limited to 167 SMS/MMS. A bit of a problem is that VF sends texts in 160-character chunks, even when the text contains no diacritics. On the other hand, it is very positive that you can change your phone number once you use up the limit and get another 167 texts/month (500 texts in total).
You can also schedule the sending time down to the minute. VF Park clearly shows you how many more texts you can send.
So, are you in too? 🙂