[dood]

Hi. I'm looking for a phone for my association. It will be used exclusively for sending text messages to all the members, roughly 500. The association does not want to buy a new phone and the second hand ones I've come across are nokia 6210, 3310 and 6110.

Will any of these do the job? The nokia site says that the 3310 will do group messages to the 250 contacts on the sim card. Does this imply that there is no phone book on the phone itself?

[AMc]

Have you looked at email to SMS (we use www.clickatell.com to deliver emergency alerts).
Message costs are between 0.044 and 0.1 Euros per recipient pasy as you go and sending is as simple as sending a properly worded email to their server.

[kelvin]

Some of the newer Nokia models allow you to set up distribution lists for sending text messages but this is a relatively new feature. Whilst older models allow you to send "multiple texts", you still need to manually select each name and wait for the message to send before proceeding to the next individual. It would certainly be very time consuming in your case.

Unless you can obtain a new model like the 6230 that supports distribution lists, I would suggest that AMc's suggestion above is probably your best bet for large scale messgaing.

To answer your question on the 3310, no, there is no internal phonebook memory - all numbers, and messages will be stored on the sim card itself so phonebook size is limited to the number of spaces provided by your operator (in some instances as little as 100 names )

Hope this is of some help to you...

K.

[dood]

Thanks for your responses.

I have downloaded mobimail from clickatell and it is fantastic, just what I needed. I notice that there is an sms limit of 10, not quite sure what this means yet but I'll work through it. So far I have sent test messages to small groups and it's working fine.

[AMc]

If you look at the SMTP API then you'll find you can send to massive distributions.
The plain text email uses your client ID and password then a list of comma separated phone numbers + the message. It's very cost effective. If you need to get help call their tech support - on the phone they're very responsive but email takes days.

[dood]

AMc

I see that you mention charges for the mobimail service. I did not come across this anywhere and the software was free to download. Is there a free trial period because I'm able to send messages already. There was no query for payment plan or details.

Also can you tell me how to increase the limit from 10 to about 1000?

Thanks