Apart from the free dumb phone, there’s one other thing that Econet did these past several months that really impressed me; the Facebook Bundles. But you and I know Facebook is only but half of our social life on the internet. WhatsApp fills the other half. Ok, there’s Twitter, Google Hangouts, WeChat, Pinterest and the others too but lets face it they’re not as big locally. So anyway, Econet has gone and unlocked that other half. They have introduced WhatsApp Bundles!
An ad in the print press today says so:
This is brilliant because, I’m sure like me, you often run out of internet bundles and find it frustrating to also have WhatsApp go cold. And when you load up your internet bundles to have to share it with non-critical apps like Gmail, app updates and other such (yes, you can block these them from the net but then what’s the point of having them?). Knowing your WhatsApp will always on no matter what – that’s great stuff.
But there’s a downside to this otherwise brilliant deal: it seems these WhatsApp bundles are totally independent of the Facebook bundles – which kind of makes this app bundle business start looking expensive. Unlimited monthly WhatsApp for $3 plus unlimited Facebook for $3 doesn’t look as cheap as, say, unlimited WhatsApp + Facebook + Twitter for $5.
The WhatsApp bundle prices (30 cents for a day, 95 cents for a week and $3 for a month) themselves do look expensive for a nifty data efficient app like WhatsApp. A little less that Facebook would have been realistic but maybe Econet knows how so WhatsApp hungry people are that they won’t look at that price tag long enough to think twice.
Prices adjustments aside this is brilliant package and I’m definitely buying myself a month!
20 comments
Who cares about twitter…Facebook and Whatsapp are all we need. Its good to see that Econet have finally woken up to the fact that they wont recover high SMS volumes being send or mms being used. Ndokufunga ka uku…..
I care about Twitter more than FB and WhatsApp. We want Twitter bundles too! If you dont know or care about Twitter why not just zip it!
refer to above comment
I really think you should try twitter purple. Twitter is not being given enough justice in Zimbabwe and that needs to change. No other social app disseminates news and info quicker and better that twitter.
I am on Twitter. The problem is the Twitter crowd wants to put itself in equal size to the facebook group. The fact is its not. Creating a facebook and Whatsapp bundle is obviously Econet’s way of trying to capitalise on the popularity of the two services. twitter needs to increase its numbers in zimbabwe. You must rembember they do not only make these hypothesis..They can actually measure and test their hypotheses by looking at their network statistics. Remember that they also own Liquid telecoms and which carries a major chunk of data transmission in this country. Obviously they have the statistics of which sites you visit the most and hw much data has passed through. They usually need this information so that they can optimise their network routing so as to reduce costs and congestion. So now they are obviusly using this data to find new revenue streams. I love how econet is good at innovation. So in short Twitter Crowd please increase your usergroup. Decrying Facebook as bad and proclaiming Twitter as the best social network wont necessarily cut it. Just work on increasing Zimbabwean Users
This i like
Are these bundles for text only, can i send and receive videos on whatsapp unlimited aswell, coz pakadaro kanenge kari ka1
As long as its on WhatsApp it’s included!
Saka that makes it a good deal? Or does it? there’s so much photo and video sending on Whatsapp munoaziva mavideo acho – lets do the math – a photo from a 5mp phone camera takes up at least 2mb, a 60sec video clip at SD quality is about 14mb, so outside the Whatsapp bundle, assuming you go for the biggest DATA bundle $50 for 2,5 GB (thats US$0.02 per MB), that photo will cost you $0.04 to send and the recipient another $0.04 to receive, and the video $0.28 for each. If you go for the unlimited $3 Whatsapp bundle you will need to send 75 x 5mp photos, or alternately 11 x 60 sec videos to make that $3 worth while. Alternatively, if you dont send any pics/vids, you would need to send 982,950 (thats right getting onto a million!!!!) text-only whatsapps using the 160-character sms standard (6553 texts per 1 MB), to make that $3 worth while. Phew!!!!! Thats some tender thumbs right there
Well pictures are ABSOLUTELY REFUSING to download on the bundle. You get the “fuzzy” preview version and that’s it! CLASSIC ECONET, don’t know why I was even surprised. I can see a lot of people chewing through A LOT of data before they figure it out.
As an early adopter , i am have purchased the monthly bundle. It seems when you post pictures or video it needs data to send and recipient also needs data to receive. It would have been excellent to unlock the full functionality of the deal to include pictures, video and audio for the USD 3. Probably they fear abuse , but they could put a cap to how much you can send or receive/download.
Econet seems haishayi pekukubata Kwiyo. When I was using the facebook bundle i would find that after a heavy session of surfing my airtime and data bundles would be finished even when using facebook app. So i now have a line dedicated to facebook…i usually put the line in my phone and turn it into a hot spot…i surf all the facebook i want.
Would be magnificent if the USSD code was working…. haven’t been able to access it since Saturday…
zviri kudhura izvi
On the bright side a lot of people can spend more than 30MB’s in less than a week upon receiving and sending Video ,Audio & image files.That makes your point null & void because thats cheap “Unlimited monthly WhatsApp for $3 plus unlimited Facebook for $3 doesn’t look as cheap” .I think its very good deal.
I want code inoshandiswa kutenga ma watsapp buddles for a week or month
if it doesn’t work on YouTube , or the internet sorry .
I THINK YOU TRICKED US BECOZ WEN YOU SAY UNLIMITED PER MONTH BT I BOT 3 WHATS APP BANDLES NW IT IS SAYNG I HV USED 100% OF YOU BUNDLES U WILL EXPERIENCE LOW SPEEDS BUT HOW IF ITS UNLIMITED BETTER TELL US THE LIMIT WE SHLD USE THEN WE CAN KNOW THAN SAYING BEFORE THE 30 DYS M WARNED THAT MEANS I HAVE TO BUY OTHER WHATS APP BUNDLES 10 DYS BEFORE THE ACTUAL DATE ITS BAD.
i will not yet
hi, am trying to buy the montily whats app bundles but its like the application is some how distorted. It gives a number of options but from .50 cents the next level is 35 USD and from that yu go to a dollar from a dollar, yu go to 50 dollars. Am sure there is something wrong. This is under monthly bundles. Pliz respond asap. Am worried and if i dial 111 for customercare, it goes to something else and we were not informed about changes in these numbers so pliz help. Maybe i bought wrong bundles when i wanted monthly whats app bundles only