Journey back with us in the Spy Phone Review archives to read about Neo-Call. The spy phone world sure has changed since 2006!
Spy Phone Review investigates Neo-Call
Neo Call seem to be an underground group of dispersed developers with no physical presence. with the only contact for the public being through a telephone in the Republic of San Marino. Its spyphone software is available for Symbian 8 and 9 based handphones.
For full details of their products, features offered and just as important, the mobile phones they support please click here.
Having used Neo Call before we were surprised to see the low ratings it garnered from our reviewers. Neo call isn’t cheap, however sometimes the old adage ‘You get what you pay for’ just doesn’t seem to be true. There are a number of toys out there that allow users to play at being James Bond, most of them are unreliable, un-installable and unsupportable. Overall Neo Call is the best of the toys. If you have an extra phone lying around you want to play around with it’s a good solution, however we cannot recommend it for anything serious.
My attempts to navigate through the Neo-Call website can at best be described as a painful experience and I can only wonder at how confusing it would be for the average person without the depth of knowledge of spyphone software that I have. These difficulties were compounded by the not insignificant fact that all of the information on the Neo-Call website are written in badly worded and phrased English, making it truly difficult to understand what the company’s products actually do.
The company lists 14 different modules on its website homepage (Neo-Phone 2, Neo-Log & Mail, Neo-SMS, Neo-Contacts, Neo-Virtual SMS, Neo-Intercept, Neo-Trax, Neo-GPS, Neo-Winmobile, Neo-Crypt, Neo-List, Neo-Record, Neo-Brand, and Neo-SIM), along with a range of handphones in another. At yet another part of their website they list additional functions or modules, including what it calls Neo-Suite 2k8 which is described as “a program set for Symbian 9 phones and merges the main applications in a single software”. At other parts of its website the company lists what appears to be combined suites named Neo Standard, Neo Full, Neo Basic, and Neo Pro.
While some of the suites and modules have brief descriptions of what function they perform, others do not. The company boasts logos for Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone, but despite extensive research I was unable to find anything other than banners for operating systems outside of Symbian and Windows Mobile.
Neo-Call’s primary focus appears to be targeted at selling it’s software pre-installed on a range of handphones, though again these appear to be primarily Symbian 8 and 9 handphones. Certainly there is no mention of Blackberry or iPhone products on it’s webpage apart from some banners than appear to have been dropped on it to fill space.
The company markets its products under a number of different names and it is fairly readily available as a pre-installed option on handphones purchased through spyphone shops. However, at $800 for the Neo-Call Full suite on top of the cost of a handphone, the product is an extremely expensive solution.
Documentation
I’ve already made comment above about the dyslexic nature of the Neo-Call website and further comment would be nothing more than repeating what has already been stated.
Installation
From what I was able to learn from the appalling Neo-Call website, installation of it’s software requires physical connection to a PC. The software is not downloaded onto the target handphone, but rather to the purchasers PC. The software is then transferred to the target handphone using either a USB cable, or by using a USB dongle or installed onto a memory card and then the memory card inserted into the target phone. For an extra fee the company will install its software using SMS WAP push.
All of these methods are problematic and mean that installing Neo-Call is not something that can be achieved in a few minutes in the same manner as FlexiSPY or Mobile Spy.
True spyphone software
From the information available on the Neo-Call website it is impossible to determine whether all of the modules or suites the company makes can be considered to be true spyphone software or not. I examined a handphone that had been pre-installed with Neo-Call Suite but the time I had with the handphone was insufficient to ascertain whether the applications and modules were truly invisible or not.
Controlling spyphone software
Neo-Call talks on its webpage about controlling the functions of the target handphone using any Java equipped handphone as a monitor phone. Throughout its website though it makes reference to having to enter long and complex command sequences to send commands to the target handphone.
Support
The quality of Neo-Call’s website is also reflected in the quality of it’s support. The company, which is based in the Republic of San Marino, a landlocked company surrounded by Italy, offers support by telephone at a cost of $4.00 per minute, or by email only. Support questions I lodged on their website took around 48 hours to answer, with responses being addressed ‘Dear gentile’?.
Conclusion
Neo-Call appears to have a broad range of modules and products designed to cater to the spyphone software market. However it’s website is such a disaster and so difficult to navigate that in all honesty I can’t imagine anyone spending the number of hours I did trying to figure out what its products can and can’t do.
The requirement to download the software onto a PC and then transfer the software to the target handphone is really an impractical installation method for most people searching for spyphone software. At a purchase price of over $800 Neo-Call is also the most expensive spyphone product I looked at and if this is added to the cost of a new handphone, which appears to be the company’s preferred way of selling its software, the whole exercise becomes ridiculous.
To be perfectly honest, if the company can’t get it’s website to operate effectively and professionally I can’t for the life of me imagine how their software could perform to as high a standard as FlexiSPY, which is less than half the cost of Neo-Call.
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