Telefónica launch TU Me

Available now
9th May 2012

Depending on where you live, you might not have heard of Telefónica.. but they own the O2 and Movistar mobile phone networks and there's a good chance that you have heard of them.

Telefónica has decided to expand away from the traditional carrier market a little with their new "TU" branded services, and their first product out of the gate is "TU Me", a unified messaging system aimed at consumers.

TU Me brings free voice and text messaging over cellular networks and WiFi, and adds photo sharing, location sharing and some clever video and audio messaging along with an easy way to find your contacts and invite others to the TU Me network. All your conversations are arranged on a timelines, so it's easy to keep track of your communications.

Because TU Me piggybacks onto your 3G data plan or WiFi connection, using the service does not eat into your SMS or talk allowance, but of course your data plan will need to be able to support it instead. If you use WiFi then you can pretty much use it as you like, but we would suspect that voice calls over 3G might eat into your carrier's data allowance quite quickly.

These services are available to all consumers worldwide regardless of network, although you can expect to the O2 and Movistar handsets with this preloaded in the future. To some extent, TU Me finds itself competing against services such as WhatsApp and similar services, but it combines several different types of messaging which makes it rather more like the solutions that big businesses use. Whether or not there is actually consumer demand for this sort of product remains to be seen, but the huge reach of Telefónica will certainly give it a kick start.

At the moment, TU Me is available only for the iPhone, but it will work on any mobile phone network, not just those owned by Telefónica. An Android version is due soon, and it's possible that TU Me might be supported on other platforms in the future as well.

You can download TU Me the iPhone right away from tumeapp.com or from the Apple AppStore.