I just tried out American Greetings new mobile ecard service.
It is a web-to-mobile greeting card service where customers can send specially designed e-cards to mobile phones on major US wireless carriers.
The service is in beta (which means it doesn't work perfectly) but it's available on their site so I decided to try it out.
In order to use the service, you must register at AmericanGreetings.com and sign up for the 30 day "trial" period. After the trial period, a membership costs $14.00 per year. I didn't take the time to research all of the membership benefits but for about $1 a month I figured it was worth a shot.
Once you register, you're now able to send mobile ecards for free. They have a pretty limited selection right now - 11 birthday greetings and 10 "just because" greetings.
You can preview and personalize the greeting and then select 1) send to a phone or 2) send to an email address. By selecting send to a phone, you then input the recipients mobile phone number, sender's name, sender's mobile phone number and a brief mobile ecard message.
You then hit send your ecard and the message is sent to the recipient. A couple of notes on the service up to this point:
1) Mobile ecards can only be sent to mobile phones using one of the following carriers: Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Cingular, and Cellular One. Not sure why T-Mobile isn't on the list yet but I'm sure they're coming. Of course, most people don't know who their recipient's carrier is, so American Greetings allows you to verify the recipient's mobile number by doing a carrier look-up. This is a great feature and I'd suggest they move this up in the "order path" to alleviate any consumer frustration. If you've gotten to this point and are ready to send a birthday greeting and then find out your friends phone is not compatible, you've wasted a fair amount of time.
2) Characters typed in "sender's name" and "mobile message" both count toward a 28 character limit which gets displayed in the SMS message. I assume this is a technical requirement but it can be limiting.
I first tried sending an ecard to my phone - a Samsung ZX10 on AT&T - and the service worked great. I received a message from shortcode 28309 with a link to view the ecard. The card was optimized for the screen but unfortuntaely there was no sound. I'm unclear if this is a known issue.
I then tried sending another card to my sister-in-law who has a Samsung SCH-U740 on Verizon. I used the compatibility verification tool and it said the phone was compatible but unfortunately it didn't work. The good news is that she did receive something that told her I had sent a message and I also received an email message that said "The delivery of your mobile ecard to XXX-XX-XXXX was unsuccessful."
I'm painfully familiar with how difficult this business is, so having the service work pretty well 1 out of 2 times is not surprising. Clearly more testing needs to be done, but with some more work this service could be very useful and fun. Now that I am a subscriber, I will be using the service and will be excited to see how it improves over the coming months.
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[Source: Mobile Phone Blog]
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