It would appear that Meteor have adding a surcharge for downloading ringtones off their website. Even downloading a special “free” ringtone priced at €0.00 attracted a delivery charge of €3.39.
Who downloads ringtones? Kids and teenagers mostly, but of course the parents pick up the tab.
Don’t get smug if you’re an O2 customer, they charge for delivery of their ringtones too but couldn’t offer a means of calculating the cost.
Want a ringtone? Use Audacity to edit your favourite mp3 to your liking and copy it to your phone. Copying to the phone is left as an exercise for the reader but could be as easy as purchasing a USB card reader. (via Dave)
I’d hardly call it stealing !! It’s there on the bottom – the price you pay for a ringtone / graphic does not include the GPRS charge for downloading it. Yes, maybe it should be far more obvious, but with the exception of content delivered by SMS (ye olde Nokia ringtones etc) “GPRS charges may apply” is tacked on to all ringtone sales stuff !
It should be a lot more obvious. When I order products online I expect the delivery charge to be clearly listed on the invoice. If it’s going to cost over 3 Euro to deliver a free or low price product then the buyer should be warned.
I’ve noticed those “GPRS charge” notices too, but never thought it would be more than 20c to 50c.
€3.39 is a little rich for my taste!
Donncha, you don’t need to buy extra hardware to copy an mp3 to your phone – simply upload it to one of the many free web servers out there (or your own, if you have one), get the address of it, and use the WAP technology built into every modern phone to go to that address. the phone will download it, and you can then use it for your ringtone. Total cost? probably about one cent. My wife has a Thundercats ringtone which I installed from a Midi file using that method.
I actually did that too, although I uploaded a couple to a very local server to this one and downloaded them over http.
Now, I already have a card reader for my camera, my phone has an SD card, and it’s simple to mount the SD card and copy over tunes and images 🙂
But you will get charged for downloading the mp3 to your phone over WAP, the GPRS charges still apply. I find Meteor a bit more expensive than O2 for WAP and I still can’t find a decent soccer results/latest scores site on it.
It can’t quite be called stealing; what they’ve done, but it’s most certainly dirty business practice to give someone something for “free”, and pick their pocket with your other hand while you’re giving it to them. It causes me great distrss to see people defending such underhanded business tactics.
Dear All,
Out on a limb, maybe, but since Meteor have such poor coverage compared to O2 and Vodafone, aren’t they ‘stealing’ every time you go out of their coverage areas?
Your billing doesn’t stop but your service does.
They can tell who is out of service-range and who isn’t. Why don’t they give a proportionally pay-back; after all we have to go to those places – we don’t have a choice.
But until one changes phone company you’re stuck with no signal and your bill adding up…
Regards,
Fachtna.
Simple really, don’t download ringtones if you don’t like paying for them. Really quite simple and it didn’t take any special thought process to come to this conclusion.
Thankyou.