REVIEW: Watch out for buggy WatchMyCell

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Yay or Nay. Every week we’ll review a new wireless application or service from the user’s point of view, with the goal of highlighting what works and what doesn’t. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
Application: WatchMyCell
Running on: Blackberry Pearl with service from T-Mobile USA
Yay: Claims to alert you when you’re about to go over your allotted minutes or text messages, thereby avoiding overage charges, which is a great idea.
Nay: Service still has some major kinks to work out, and is a bit unnecessary.
We say: WatchMyCell is a great idea and could be a wonderful service. We just think it first needs to make sure its Web site and alerts service are operating properly.
Review: WatchMyCell proposes to help those of us mobile over-eaters manage our minutes used and text messages sent/received, or at least it is supposed to help. Signing up is easy; visit the Web site at watchmycell.com, provide your carrier, user name and password and log on. You then choose the number of minutes and messages used for when you’d like to be alerted. For example, we used a phone with 1,000 anytime minutes and chose to be alerted after 500 minutes were used. For text messages, there are 400 available and we chose to be alerted after 200 messages were used up. Seems simple enough?
The service did do what it said it would and sent a text message when we arrived at the 500-minute mark, but didn’t alert us when we surpassed our text message threshold. And the alert message was a little jumbled; it didn’t say it was from WatchMyCell, which makes it easy to miss.
The service’s Web site also proved difficult. When we logged on to WatchMyCell, we were greeted with “Hello Stephanie,” which is not the named we provided. We then checked out the summary of our activity, which is a nice feature except that the information was wrong. According to WatchMyCell, we were still below our 1,000 minute allotment, but we knew that in reality we had already exceeded that total. The total provided for text messages was also incorrect.
Further, a subsequent check of our text message allotment showed that 12 of 1 text messages had been used. And the next check said 14 of 1 had been used. What?!?!?! This could be a type of crazy fraction counting that I don’t understand.
As Whitney Houston would say, “hell to the nay!”
The service, besides being faulty, also seems a bit unnecessary. Our carrier provides essentially the same information via its Web site as well as a through an automated texting service.
So our advice is to just use the services provided by your carrier to find out your wireless usage. WatchMyCell has a number of kinks that need to be worked out before it becomes useful.