WOW Phones

[chipmeister]

Anyone have any poop on what the deal is on the wow phones? Do they actually exist (for public use), how to reserve them, etc? They sound kinda neat if they are available.

[labadooze]

I copied this from another post.

 

"I asked about the WOW phones. They will soon be called RC Phones but they are not completed yet. They will look like an iphone & have quite a few cool options on them, some yet to be released. The price will be $17.50 per phone for the week. That is an awesome price. Especially since your cell phone will cost a minimum of $2.49 a minute and .50 to send a text & .05 to receive a text."

[steamboats]

WOW Phone or Royal Connect is $ 17.50 per cruise. It´s an iPhone only working onboard. You can call other WOW phones and cabin phones. There´s the daily activities of the cruise compass on the phone. You can send text messages to other Royal Connect phones. Kids (3-11y) who are wearing an Kids´ Finder wristband can be located by parents with the Royal Connect phone.

 

steamboats

[the plumbers wife]

This will be a nice feature, well worth the $$! We are ten people age 14-72! When we went on the Enchantment of the Seas (RCCL) two years ago we could not find the then 12 :eek: year old. It was a wild time trying to find him and that ship is not that big - he was in the ARCADE, he had forgot to tell one of us that he had left his cabin!

[Cruise Gopher]

How many are going to be available for rental? Will they be ready for use on the Oasis Inaugural sailing on Dec 5th?

 

Also, are they rolling these out fleetwide? If so, any idea on timelines? It would be nice to have them on our cruise in January on the Freedom of the Seas since we have a large group of us going.

 

What would be REALLY cool would be if you could somehow connect your own personal iPhone up to the ship's WOW Phone system and get all the same features. Maybe just charge half the cost since you have your own iPhone?

[steamboats]

I saw them working on the phones on Nov 20th/21st in one of the Adventure Ocean workshop rooms. They were gone on the 22nd or 23rd. So I´m pretty sure they will be available Dec 5th.

 

BTW read here : 800 phones, first come first serve, Oasis only

 

steamboats

[MellyBell]

I agree the price is great. We want to get a couple during our cruise for that price. The only drawback is that I think I read somewhere that it is going to be $1,000 if it is lost or damaged. Has anyone else heard that or know anything about it?

[tim716]

I'd gladly pay the full 17.50 to connect my Iphone to the network (so I don't have to storm the ship to get there first and grab a phone before they're sold out)

BUT: I have a simlock-free Iphone (bought in Italy), and you'd definitely need to have one too to be technically able to connect to WOW network, "standard" iphones sold in the US are locked to AT&T sim cards and can't be used with the ship system for sure.

[tim716]

Speaking about the lost/damaged fee, if they use simlock free iphones for this, $1000 is a fair fee, simlock free 3GS 32 costs about that.

[labadooze]

Does anyone know if they are in service yet?

[mini me]

As of dec 12 I was told that there are 3rd party software problems to be worked out. The Food & Bev Boss said in about 2-3 weeks was the working timeline for beta test again

[MellyBell]

It was not available for our 12/5 cruise. I went up to guest services and the first 3 people did not know anything about it.

[flaxen]

I saw the developers with a large charging station and laptops working in the conference centre area. No firm date for rollout since they still don't work properly. Offered to be guinea pigs but they declined.

[bajathree]

They are NO longer called WOW phones BTW....they are now referred to as ROYAL phones.....and are one of the works in progress on Oasis....still in testing stage....just like the GPS devices for kids which were close to the size of a pack of cards and meant to be put on a child's wrist :rolleyes: back to the drawing board for that one.

[tim716]

Does anybody know if they started the service on the cruise which started this Saturday?