"You're in luck" -- Pinger TextFree and the fatal flaw

Sometimes a company makes a product or service that is *almost* perfect, but has a fatal flaw.

Pinger.com's TextFree is just one such service: its apps for Android and iPhone are fairly decent; even with the buggy interface within the newer TextFree with Voice, the call quality is great and the texting is, well, something to text or tweet about.

Yet the web version lags considerably, especially in one key area: the web service is inaccessible from an iPhone's browser.

Typing in www.pinger.com/textfree yields the typical CSS redirect to http://m.pinger.com/content/tf_web.html with the "You're in luck" tagline displaying the iPhone app.

What if you can't download the app or are in a situation where the app doesn't work, as I found myself in today, where a restricted network only allowed access via http in the browser?

You're out of luck: choosing "full site" yields the full site page in the iPhone Safari browser, as it should, but choosing "login" from the main page's top right corner tosses the user back into the endless loop of http://m.pinger.com/content/tf_web.html

Great idea, poorly executed.

iPhoned