Find yourself in China? Get yourself a local home redirect number from Call Me In China
Call Me In China does what it says on the tin, as the phrase goes.
The service makes it super-easy for anyone living in China to receive calls from friends, family and work colleagues via a local number. Given that Beijing is fast becoming the centre of the Universe, I’m sure there are quite a few people that might benefit from this.
The concept behing Call Me In China is that it’s a total arse for your contacts to have to mess around with calling cards. Call Me In China simply assigns you a local number for your geography that diverts to your phone in China (or Hong Kong).
So you could have a US local number, or a UK number, that folk call. It’s a standard phone number, no international dialling and it’ll be included in most unmetered calling plans. You’re then billed per minute.
Here’s the overview from their website:
Our service makes it cheap and easy for people outside of China to reach you directly on your mobile phone in China or Hong Kong. When you sign up, you choose a new number in your home country (a new number that will be used exclusively by you). You then give that number to your friends, family, customers, or anyone who may want to call you. Calling this number will connect directly to your mobile phone. You pay us a low per-minute rate (see below for rates), and the person calling just pays their phone operator the usual fee for a local call — often free.
If you’re traveling between Hong Kong and mainland, you can even switch your number to forward to whichever number you happen to be using at the moment. When you’re in Hong Kong, you can set your CallMeInChina number to ring you in Hong Kong. When you’re in mainland, update the number to ring your mobile there. You can update your number at any time.
Other services are available of course, however I particularly like the manner in which the service is focusing on serving a particular need — folk that want a guaranteed ‘permanent’ redirect number and who value that utility higher than the alternatives.
Full pricing details are on their FAQ. I haven’t tried it but if this looks interesting, they’ve a 30-day money-back guarantee so it might be worth giving it a go. Plus.. they’ve got apps for iPhone and Android.
So it could well be rather useful for anyone working temporarily or on secondment in China, or anyone planning a significant walkabout trip around the country.
Here’s a bonus too: In celebration of the service’s launch, they are offering 15 minutes free to folks who sign-up to try out the service. Just use coupon code “launch“.
Let me know what you think…
