Wireless carriers reportedly surprised by Apple's iMessage feature - Page 2

As soon as I saw them messaging between iPad and iPhone, i wondered how this would work. Would the iPhone have two separate messaging apps, one called iMessaging for chatting between iOS users and another called Messages for everyone else? Would messages from your iPad be free but messages from your iPhone still count toward your texting plan? Now it sounds as though neither is true, and that there is a single messaging app that happens to send messages to iOS devices outside the carrier's messaging plan. But assuming a person doesnt know who in their address book does and doesn't have an iPhone, how will the user know which messages are costing them and which are free? Will they be visually marked somehow? What if my friend has an iPad and an android phone; will iMessaging somehow notify me which he's texting me from so that I can know if its counting against my cellular texting plan or not? It all seems very confusing.

RIM started it by locking their customers in to their BBM messaging system. It's been dangerous for many years.

Correct. It's also why the character limit exists - because that's all this signaling packet is designed to contain. Outside the US it's free and caught on much more quickly since it could replace a phone call in many cases. Interesting read about that.

I despise the carriers for this and consider it almost criminal that they charge for it but, boy, what a great marketing ploy to get us to pay for something that is, essentially, riding tower/phone communications that are happening anyway. I like that Sprint bundles SMS into their plans. I know I'm paying for it but I can pretend that I don't have to since there's no way to choose a text package.

Back on topic - I can only see it adding to confusion if someone has to use two separate text messaging apps and remember who has an iOS device and who doesn't. Even if they were to develop an Android app (really?!) it still excludes too many people.

Totally! It is just the nature of evolution!

I dont have access to the developer preview, so I cannot say with certainty, but thinking like Apple would think... i'd say it'll go like this. SMS+imessage is rolled into one app called iMessage. When you launch a new text, it will ask you for the users name, and if you have both a phone number and an apple ID for them, it'll prompt you to start a new message via SMS or iMessage (similar to how if you want to facetime someone and you press facetime from within the contact name you get the option to facetime their cell number or an email address). When you select the phone number it will SMS them in the traditional way, still using your text message plan. If you select iMessage it'll route via 3G or WiFi thru apples servers via their apple ID and back to their device. You'll get better pictures/video quality than the crappy videos your MMS now, plus the ability to see when they're typing and if they've read/received it. The only indication of the difference between the services will be the slightly grayed out "iMessage" or probably "SMS" text that in the type field just before you go to type... (this i noticed from one of the screen caps from the keynote had iMessage in the type field before he began typing in the message box). That, and the fact that if you think you're iMessaging someone and you don't see the typing indicator before they type or the read/received receipts... then you're probably SMSing them.

It'll probably be just as, or slightly less confusing than using the similar service on Blackberry... and thats not at all complicated.

It *could* be similarly confusing as it is now (but hopefully not) when you click "text message" from within a user's contact card and it asks you if you want to text their email address or cell number. If you choose email address, of if you get texts from the same user with different cell phones, but you've already had a chat going with that user on another number, they will just show up as two separate entries in your chat list with no immediate visual indication of which point of contact your messaging with "John Doe". Hopefully with iOS 5 they can at least indicate what form of service you're using next to the recipient's name in the messaging list. Or color them differently.

We'll see

Why does someone have to remember it? Let the iphone do that. Doesn't it already? There is the option to list an iphone number in the contacts already.

It's just one more thing the carriers will resist until they realize the game is up and find other methods of squeezing their customers. The carries will ALWAYS find away to make $$$. iMessage just forces them to get more 'creative'...

At $30 per month, I'd be awfully tempted to buy the youngest kid of mine an iPhone just to eliminate the carrier's recurring charges.

Final nail in RIMs coffin...

Tough!

I wold imagine open API's. OpenSource? Not very likely.

Ok well this is for iPhones only. If you want to text to someone else you have Textie as an alternative.

Sucks to be them! Funny, BlackBerry Messenger is a BB only feature and touted as a BB advantage - why shouldn't this be the same? If you have an android device I guess you fall back to the more universal SMS (just don't try to text me as I'm re-blocking it now!)

Call customer service and demand to have it removed from your account. I dunno about anyone else, but AT&T did it for me until I bought the iPhone 4 and had to renew my contract. By then I had everyone in my circle trained to not bother to try to text me so I left it - the few times I have texted the $.20 charge wasn't bothersome. But with this, I'm calling up AT&T tomorrow and re-blocking it on my account!

Hate to be a party Party pooper. Carriers will make up for sms by raising rate plans or some other way.

Built into the OS, present on every phone, works the same way for everyone.

Apps like Textie will still exist - partially for the reasons you cite. But for non-power users that have just a handful of apps on their phone, this is huge!

It would take quite a bit of texting to bump up data usage significantly! I wish them luck with that...

It's for all iOS devices...

It's embedded in the texting app. So instead of having two texting apps, it's all there in the native one.

Plus, no ads, your friends won't get oddly formatted texts, or texts from numbers that aren't your phone number...

This is clearly a direct attack on BlackBerry. It'll reduce the use of SMS by some users too and that's a good thing because carriers have been ripping us off since SMS was invented.

The carriers might have been surprised by iMessage but they got some really good news today. The availability of over the air syncing and updates means that the average user will be using a lot more data than they do today. Locking people into higher tier data plans means more guaranteed income every month.

It seems confusing because it hasn't been released yet. The information will come, be patient

Yes, it is all in one app.

In response to how do you know which messages are free and which ones cost, the answer is: whether or not they're free or not, it'll still be less than what you're currently using.

Apple is releasing this in order to provide text for non phone devices. It is a convenient by product that we will get free texts.

Finally, address book as an option to assign the name "iPhone" instead of "mobile" or "home". After using that a couple times I've learned who has an iPhone and who doesn't

Not a direct solution, but there's enough there to mitigate most of your concerns.

Yeah sorry that's what I meant but misspoke.

I wonder if this will increase the number of congressmen sexting

Maybe i just don't have many friends - but I've got about 7 people i text constantly with an iphone and about 3 who don't. My solution = buy a Touch in September, cancel my unlimited messaging (on my non-smart phone) which costs 13 dollars a month. Touch pays for itself in just over a year, and yeah, I carry 2 things around with me but I can still text for 50c a message for those that don't have iOS devices.

Apparently SMSs are green, while iMessages are blue.

There are several apps in the android market app store that allow this sort of communication already. They also allow it between different OSs, so I am sure you will find something in the apple app store to communicate with them. Use iMessage for iPhone friends and another service for android friends.

One thing is for sure, the carriers will find some way to make up for lost funds from this. I am surpirised that some of them haven't offered their own cloud services by now.

That is a really good point. As I was watching the Keynote I was thinking "Wow! That is going to be a lot of bandwidth" (data is quite expensive in my country).

The carriers will still get their pound of flesh. Still, some excellent features demoed today!

Here in the UK we get unlimited free texts on all plans with o2 so this is less exciting over here. What I don't get is do you now have two messaging apps on iPhone, iMessage and Messages both with the same icon, or are they merged?

Start converting them

To me this is the biggest announcement of the day, far more reaching and business model provoking than the cloud or music match. It is only a start…

I think this is a more US-centric problem. In Austria for instance you can get a 19/month plan that includes 1,000 free sms and 2,1000 free voice minutes (and you only get the minutes billed when you actively call someone).
As long as you are selecting a plan that includes a good number of sms I don't think the carriers make a lot of money with sms in Europe.

So resistance from the carriers from our side of the pond could be quiet minimal.

Look, I don't have an SMS plan and never had one. TextFree originally could only send messages to other Textfree users. Sound familiar. If the only people that Gruber wants to text are using iOS devices, then he'll be fine, just like I was. I pretty much only text my wife.

For the extremely infrequent occasions where I wanted to text someone else, I paid the 20 cents. The most I've ever paid was maybe a buck and that beats the heck out of even $5/month.

Just because you text a lot of different people doesn't mean he does.

I've never had a text plan and when TextFree only worked with other Textfree users, I still didn't. For the occasional non-textfree user, I paid the 20cents and still came out ahead month instead of paying even the $5/month of the cheapest plan.

If the majority of his texts are to iOS users, just like the majority of mine were and still are to my wife, he'll be find, just like I am.

Any messaging system that is an alternative to SMS is welcome, iOS or otherwise. It's called competition. Now that Apple isn't carrier-tied, they can do more for us.

Yeah, Apple is trying to get people to buy their products and not something else. Can't have THAT.

(Of course, if you were calm and rational, you'd understand that there are many options for messaging outside the Apple ecosystem. But why be rational when you can be hysterical?)

Just to clarify a little about it's functionality and why 3rd party apps aren't quite the same.

iMessages replaces your SMS app. In some apple magical way it detects that the number (or email in the iPad's case) is enabled for iMessages. I'm guessing in the same way as facetime works using your number as your ID. If this is available the text you send will be sent as an iMessage and display in the app as blue. If this isn't the case or if the iMessage can't be delivered for whatever reason the SMS system takes over.

This is all completely transparent to the user (other than messages being blue rather than green). If the bubbles weren't blue you wouldn't even know until you got your bill at the end of the month and saw how much fewer sms's are being sent on your plan.

This is killer. You can turn it off for sure and go back to SMS but why would you. It's not like you have to change anything you are currently doing.

Seriously? You act like this is new. People with BBs have had this for years and the carriers are alive and well.

There are no differences in utility between iMessage and BBM? I'm not well versed in BBM so I'm honestly asking, but from what I can tell iMessage uses Apple's messaging servers, like FaceTime, but then uses open protocol standards for the service.

On top of that it looks like iMessage has NAT that will allow not just Apple's cellphones, but all their other products to connect to each other as if they are same. Does BBM have the rich media option and letting you know when someone is typing? Is BBM even an IP service?

With iMessage and Facetime, I do not recognize Apple on that point.

Why they bring Facetime when they got already iChat. Why they bring iMessage when they got already iChat.

Why iMessage doesn't talk to Mac too?


Why not just put iChat on the iPhone with all the same feature of iChat on the Mac. Then you got video, text, file transfer etc...

now it's like a mess, on the Mac we got iChat and Facetime. On the iPhone, Facetime and iMessage

It look like the department work all in their corner without talking to each other, it look like microsoft strategie

Yea because we here in the states don't pay for stuff that's free.