Blau (Germany) and Simyo (Netherlands): little update
 

Hi everybody,just a couple of changes

BLAU.DE:

Now the validity of the card is 12 months and every refill gives 12 months of airtime.

Simyo Netherlands:

International SMS inside the EU are charged € 0.50, outside EU they are still € 0,75

Data calls are now possible at 10cent/100kb.

You can activate also a daily bundle of 20 mb for € 1, valid for 24 hours or a 30 day bundle of 200 mb for € 10

Hope those infos are useful!

International SMS/EU
 

International SMS from the Netherlands to another EU-country are not capped.
International SMS inside the EU sent from a country different than the home country of the SIM (in the EU) are capped by EU regulations to 13 ct. So if you take your SIMYO (NL) i.e. to Poland and send a SMS to Spain, it will be charged only 13 cents.

Of course i know that a EU card in EU roaming can sms for 13 ct., but i'm not sure if i understood fully what you meant with it.

If there was a misunderstanding over the sentence "International SMS inside the EU are charged € 0.50" actually the meaning was "international SMS sent from Holland to another EU land are charged € 0.50"

This thing with international SMS being cheaper when roaming is a funny business. (The same is often true of calls as well). I find it so stupid that for example Vodafone Spain charge 69c for an SMS sent to the UK from their own network in Spain, but if you happen to live near the border to Portugal and pick up a mobile phone signal from there then that same message will cost you just 13c!

So in the Netherlands, if you happen to live near the border with Germany or Belgium, it is worth switching over onto a foreign network if you plan on sending lots of international SMS's. I suppose in some areas, you get a choice of 3 countries mobile phone networks. (e.g. Aachen in Germany, or Basel in Switzerland)

Indeed, luckily i'm not sending international SMS on a daily basis (and i can send cheap SMS via Skype) but some choices are quite funny.

One example: T-Mobile NL charges a international sms 7 ct. if you got a prepaid (the 24/7 tariff) but if you got a postpaid the price raise to 24 ct.

[Add-on for my first post: Simyo allows also MMS at 50 ct. per message]