Samba Mobile: a first look
Hot on the tails of Impossible Telecom, we recently got a press release from another mobile network that promises to redefine the UK market. Samba Mobile is a brand new project that describes itself as:
An exciting new service that gives you free mobile broadband to your laptop, desktop or tablet. In return, we ask you to watch a few short, high-quality video adverts. You choose what videos to watch and when to watch them.
Now that’s rather interesting especially if you’re one of many people paying a fortune for data rates on your mobile or tablet or for a dongle with the main mobile networks.
This isn’t the first time networks or ISPs have attempted to offer free access funded by adverts but it will be interesting to see what they are doing differently to make it work this time round. It also remains to be seen how intrusive the ads are.
Samba Mobile is currently not available and hasn’t launched yet in the UK but we’ve heard it may work by letting you build up “credits” by viewing adverts which you can then spend on bandwidth or time online. It’s also likely they they will run on 3’s impressive data infrastructure.
So what do you think? Are you fed up of ads online or would it be a price worth paying for free mobile internet? And do you think it will last?
OK, so i’ve been using this now for about 2 months, Samba gave me a free 250Mb for filling in a questionnaire, so that was helpful.
As far as the service goes, it’s fine, same as 3.
The biggest single problem is what i anticipated: Lack of adverts.View the full grid and they start to disappear, so you have to watch again, and then you can’t because they’ve “expired”. I doctored my profile to get it to feed me different stuff, but you can only whatch a pot noodle ad so many times.
I’m now down to just 3 ads that I can view, so it’s not good. Beginning to lose interest.
Does the Samba Battery extension for FF or Chrome work using apple imac, OSX 10.7.4, I already have a dongle.
Do you supply basic dongle setup information ?
Don’t know if it works on MAC, but dongle set up is simple.You just use the APN for “3” i.e. “3internet”
Forgot to say if you are reading Samba, that the Battery extension for Chrome works perfectly on Chrome for Linux too, perhaps you should mention that on the download page.
OK, So curiosity got the better of me and for £7.50, decided to give it a try.Had the SIM a few hours, and watched a few ads to charge it up. Below are my first thoughts:
Samba told me they use 3’s APN, and indeed they do. I use a dongle in either a Draytek Vigor 2820Vn high end router or a Zoom 3g portable router,works fine in both of those.
The payback is a bit more generous than I first thought, one 30 second ad yielded 3.5Mb. Nice.
We need more ads, and some of them are weird or boring.
I wish them success, not 100% convinced but a good try, and the fact that you can pay to top up too, means it just might work.
I’ve had a read of the FAQ’s on their site and watched a handful of adverts to get the feel of what they are offering. It looks too good to be true if I’m honest about it.
Average of watching 6 adverts was that they last on average 1′ 30″ shortest 38″ longest 2′ 2″.
They claim that on average you will earn 3.5Mb credit per advert. That works out at about 2.3Mb for watching 1 minute of advert.
If you pay to top up it is £5.99/500Mb (not excessive really) or 1.2p/Mb. So you get “paid” 1.9p/min for watching (£1.15/Hr).
That sounds like I’m being mean. I’m not. If they honour it then it is very reasonable. Watching 15 mins of adverts would pretty much feed my modest surfing habit for the rest of the evening, and it’s only what you do if you watch TV anyway.
Micro SIM is £7.49 delivered, so may get one just to see if it is any good. Their website was updated today.
From the latest update on the website it seems that a micro SIM is £4.99 + £2.50 delivery, so it might just be worth a try…
Hmmm, that’s a bit extortionate for the delivery.
Well they did say they would launch last week but there were no emails and no service, so I suppose it depends what you mean by “launch”.
I’m very keen to know what the ratio of advert viewing : service might be.
When watching freeview channels you need to suffer at least 20 minutes of adverts for 40 minutes of programming.
Due to changed circumstances i’m about skint, so would trade some advert viewing for some access (about 40mb/day would be plenty).
We hope to find out more details about exactly that after the bank holiday 🙂
Also, a bit off topic, but does anyone here have the inside line on what went on with Freedomtalk/ Three / A1thechstore/ Dida mobile that left it’s pre-paid customers high and dry with no service?
I still haven’t received an email from Samba…
What did you write to them about?
I pre-registered at their website and they acknowledged it with the message, “Good shout, you’re on the smart list. Watch out for our email.” But zilch so far…
I expect they’ll wait until they are ready to launch before sending it out.
I pre-registered for their dongle service and I finally got an email from them yesterday:
http://sendgrid.com/wf/webmail?rp=ZTI1bGQzTnNaWFIwWlhKZmFXUTZNVEl6TkN4MWMyVnlYMmxrT2pJMU5qVTBmUWV5SnVaWGR6YkdWMGRHVnlYMmxrSWpvaU16VTFNelE0SWl3aWJtVjNjMnhsZEhSbGNsOTFjMlZ5WDJsa0lqbzJPREkxTlRRM056TXlmUT09
This would be ideal for me.. I would love to try it if it does not involve any upfront costs. I assume they would send us the data sims
We’re pretty sure you’ll get a SIM sent for free and there will be no costs to you at all.
@Jason Barratt
Registered on your website, look forward to hearing from you, will be interested to see details of your business model, T & C’s etc. If it’s cheap to try and has a SIM only option I’ll happily try it out.
Joe
Hi Joe. We’ll be running a feature and interview with Samba Mobile shortly and will definitely get the answers to these questions.
I would try it, but not if it involved any up front cost.
I used Freedomtalk for three months without trouble, but then got ripped off when a 6 month pre paid SIM got cut off after a month.
I think the base networks need to get a grip on some of these outfits before they damage their own reputations.
With regard to Oviomobile, you have to pay £20 up front and the conditions are anything but clear. I will keep well away from it.
Will it last? NO! it will last until the money people have paid runs out and they don’t pay Vodafone!
We want to know this too. We’ll be giving the CEO a bit of a grilling soon to find out all these answers so check back for our interview 🙂
hi There.
We’re launching Samba mobile next week. Get in touch if you would like to speak to one of the management team and we can tell you more about what we are planning to do.
Thanks for the interest in our business!
Best regards
The Samba Team
Have you heard of these guys: http://ovivomobile.com/
Have now 🙂 Do you have any experience of them?