[QUOTE=polymnia;1391762]MMS/SMS is simple and universal. No one needs to configure a server, their mobile, learn a recipient's carrier, etc to use MMS/SMS.
It is not universal. Email is more universal than texting. You need a cell phone to send or receive it, and many don't pay for text messaging, and therefore, don't use it. A lot of people I know don't use it and don't pay for it.
However, I do love your reference of the nerd website readers....I can imagine the poll question, "We recently polled a selection of nerds..." LOL
Your messaging plan does not include MMS messages. Your messaging plan is for SMS. Read Apple's website on the 3.0 preview. Very clear, right at the bottom: * MMS messaging is available only on iPhone 3G; fees may apply. MMS may not be available in all areas.
Sending a pic through email is free, sending a pic through MMS is not. Enjoy.
I have the family messaging on my plan and all of the other phones on the plan get free MMS from AT&T
I'm questioning the claim that 3000 people polled on a nerd website can extrapolate millions of people. It extrapolates millions of nerd website readers. I doubt (though I readily admit I have to statistics to back me up) that there are millions of people reading nerd websites. Even if there are, polling them only samples 'people who read nerd websites'. There is certainly a couple orders of magnitude more people in the general population who would be perhaps a more useful demographic to sample?
First of all, to take it out of order, I'm pretty sure that there are millions of people reading these web sites. Maybe tens of millions.
What makes you think that iPhone users, who are the most eager to use the web, and services, from their phones, are NOT a big percentage of "nerd" site readers? You don't know that either.
No one seriously doubts that cut and paste is by far, the biggest feature that most people have wanted. So the 48% in the poll sure seems about right. The others seem to fall in place as well. Likely the numbers don't exactly match that of iPhone users overall, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were close enough.
Quote:
I have no vested interest in your argument either way, in fact I haven't even been following it. I am commenting on what seems to me a faulty statistical assumption.
Statistics can be funny that way. Some of these polls can be more accurate than "scientifically" written, and selected for ones. I had several years of statistics for scientists in college. One thing I learned is that the "art" of selecting victims, I mean people, for polling is itself subject to statistical fluctuation. Meaning that any random sample is as likely to be as good as any other. Even self selected people are often fine, as long as they can only vote once.
What happens is that people on either side of the issues cancel each other out, resulting in a pretty good result, as long as enough people answer. Even 500 people can result in an accurate enough poll. More than about 3,000 doesn't serve to up the quality.
I welcome this but I think it is overrated. Most people can type faster on the portrait keyboard. You cannot very efficiently type with two fingers on the landscape keyboard and for typing with one finger the keys are naturally further apart, which means you have to move around more, resulting in a slower typing speed. On the portrait keyboard I can hold the phone and type on it with the same hand, ie, I only need one hand. with the landscape keyboard, I need both hands.
Everyone is different, of course, but it's accepted that the best keyboards have the keys larger, and further apart. That increases the correct hit rate. I find typing with both thumbs much easier on the landscape keyboard. The best e-mail phones all have landscape keyboards, or keyboards that are wide in the vertical mode, such as the early Blackberrys.
Since a large number of people have been requesting this, it's obviously an issue.
Your point is taken, but I think you miss my point.
When I send an email on my iPhone, I bring up their contact info, I tap their email address, I start typing the message, I hit send.
When I send an SMS on my iPhone (were I to do so ), I bring up their contact info, I tap Text Message, I start typing the message, I hit send.
From the use case POV, they're equivalent.
So, stay with me here... what if, when you put someone's number in, Address Book looked up their carrier, and added the correct email equivalent to the contact as well?
Now, to send an email to *their phone*, you'd perform the same steps as above. No worse than sending an SMS, and much MUCH more flexible.
Or, assume that they have an email address - I mean, who doesn't right? Now if they can access their email over their phone, you don't even have to use the SMS gateway. It's just another email client, like any other device on the internet. Much, much better.
The sooner phones support push mail, the sooner we can get away from this closed-wall network model.
Ok, I understand your proposal that Apple's Contact app does the legwork to send via SMS gateway. That makes sense. And is quite ingenious, really. The downside is that people (hopefully) want to get in touch with you, too. They will just send to your phone number from their simple text app on the free phone they got for signing the 2 year contract. No one is going to think, 'oh, I need to do something special to send a message to Kickaha, click, click, okay then...Now to send to Polymnia, I need to do it this other way...'
To be a proper replacement for the existing SMS/MMS system we need to be able to continue sending messages to eachother's phone numbers using a new PUSH service. Perhaps it will be an IMAP IDLE technology, but to be used by the masses it needs to be available by default on all new handsets.
Texting never took off in the US early on because carriers didn't play nice with each other. I tried texting my friends on an early SMS phone. I didn't work, mostly. Useless. I qquit trying to use it immdiately. A couple years later, the carriers worked the bugs out, everyone could talk to everyone and it took off like crazy.
Unlimited messaging on a family plan for all phones, no matter how many, is $30 a month. We have that plan, but come no where close to making it pay.
Ouch! $30/month just for messaging? I am content with my original iPhone with SMS messaging which was included in the $20 data plan. I have never had any reason to send an MMS message. However, families with teenagers are a different story.
MMS/SMS is simple and universal. No one needs to configure a server, their mobile, learn a recipient's carrier, etc to use MMS/SMS.
It is not universal. Email is more universal than texting. You need a cell phone to send or receive it, and many don't pay for text messaging, and therefore, don't use it. A lot of people I know don't use it and don't pay for it.
However, I do love your reference of the nerd website readers....I can imagine the poll question, "We recently polled a selection of nerds..." LOL
Email is certainly LESS universal on cell phones than text. There are still a lot of non-smart phones out there. Granted, some of them can send/receive email, but it is certainly a 3rd class application on these phones, a pain to use and unreliable. In certain circles email may be gaining traction but by and large, texting is the universal messaging format right now.
All this is changing and I like Kickaha's idea of phones automatically figuring out the proper configuration to send emails through an SMS/MMS gateway to people's phones to be delivered as SMS. That only replaces half the SMS traffic though (no more SMS originating at the handsets, but still just as many received). Maybe its a good enough stopgap to see us through until all phones handle email thru a push service. Then we can really stick a fork in SMS.
Email is certainly LESS universal on cell phones than text. There are still a lot of non-smart phones out there. Granted, some of them can send/receive email, but it is certainly a 3rd class application on these phones, a pain to use and unreliable. In certain circles email may be gaining traction but by and large, texting is the universal messaging format right now.
All this is changing and I like Kickaha's idea of phones automatically figuring out the proper configuration to send emails through an SMS/MMS gateway to people's phones to be delivered as SMS. That only replaces half the SMS traffic though (no more SMS originating at the handsets, but still just as many received). Maybe its a good enough stopgap to see us through until all phones handle email thru a push service. Then we can really stick a fork in SMS.
I should have clarified that email is more universal as a form of current communication. Almost everyone has an email address, regardless of how they can access it. Not as many people use texting as a form of general communcation.
I should have clarified that email is more universal as a form of current communication. Almost everyone has an email address, regardless of how they can access it. Not as many people use texting as a form of general communcation.
I see your point. Granted.
However, in the context of communicating via the written word using a mobile, SMS is by far the most popular way.
As long as we all agree some for of instantaneous, universal text messaging is an important service we need something like SMS. A more modern technological underpinning and less expense would be ideal. But the bottom line is that some system must fill this need.
Ouch! $30/month just for messaging? I am content with my original iPhone with SMS messaging which was included in the $20 data plan. I have never had any reason to send an MMS message. However, families with teenagers are a different story.
Our daughter gets hundreds a month. We find that when she's with her friends, she doesn't want to pick up the phone and talk, but she does respond to SMS.
Ouch! $30/month just for messaging? I am content with my original iPhone with SMS messaging which was included in the $20 data plan. I have never had any reason to send an MMS message. However, families with teenagers are a different story.
The $30 per month is for family texting unlimited includes SMS & MMS for all phones on the plan. I you have the $20 plan it would include MMS on your phone right now.
I must have missed it, but how does 3.0 differentiate between double-tapping on text to zoom to full screen (as in a web page) and double-tapping to select text?
It's not needed - it's just more convenient for some. At an anally-raping price. Knock yourself out, I'll be looking for the way to turn it off, since most of us in the US *can't* block them at the service provider, unlike the rest of the world.
Not all countries have expensive MMS. I'm in Australia, and i pay $3 (yes $3) a month for UNLIMITED MMS. You don't believe how infuriating it was not to be able to send of receive any. It's massive in this country.
What's the reasoning behind not supporting MMS on original iPhones? As a decision it seems arbitrary at best, given that my 2 year old phone I owned before I got my original iPhone 2 years ago supported it, its hard to believe that the original iPhone doesn't have the grunt to support such a simple feature.
I would lucky-guess the same reason Microsoft made Windows version of Halo 2 exclusively DX10 title. Considering that Halo 2 was original XboX game and should run fine on DX8 setup, only reason they did it (if you ignore their lame explanations that game actually does require DX10 to look it's best) was to force people upgrade to Vista.
Want MMS? No problem. All you need is new iPhone
Sales are down, people - every effort to push 'em up is a valid one
Comments
It is not universal. Email is more universal than texting. You need a cell phone to send or receive it, and many don't pay for text messaging, and therefore, don't use it. A lot of people I know don't use it and don't pay for it.
However, I do love your reference of the nerd website readers....I can imagine the poll question, "We recently polled a selection of nerds..." LOL
Your messaging plan does not include MMS messages. Your messaging plan is for SMS. Read Apple's website on the 3.0 preview. Very clear, right at the bottom: * MMS messaging is available only on iPhone 3G; fees may apply. MMS may not be available in all areas.
Sending a pic through email is free, sending a pic through MMS is not. Enjoy.
I have the family messaging on my plan and all of the other phones on the plan get free MMS from AT&T
I'm questioning the claim that 3000 people polled on a nerd website can extrapolate millions of people. It extrapolates millions of nerd website readers. I doubt (though I readily admit I have to statistics to back me up) that there are millions of people reading nerd websites. Even if there are, polling them only samples 'people who read nerd websites'. There is certainly a couple orders of magnitude more people in the general population who would be perhaps a more useful demographic to sample?
First of all, to take it out of order, I'm pretty sure that there are millions of people reading these web sites. Maybe tens of millions.
What makes you think that iPhone users, who are the most eager to use the web, and services, from their phones, are NOT a big percentage of "nerd" site readers? You don't know that either.
No one seriously doubts that cut and paste is by far, the biggest feature that most people have wanted. So the 48% in the poll sure seems about right. The others seem to fall in place as well. Likely the numbers don't exactly match that of iPhone users overall, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were close enough.
I have no vested interest in your argument either way, in fact I haven't even been following it. I am commenting on what seems to me a faulty statistical assumption.
Statistics can be funny that way. Some of these polls can be more accurate than "scientifically" written, and selected for ones. I had several years of statistics for scientists in college. One thing I learned is that the "art" of selecting victims, I mean people, for polling is itself subject to statistical fluctuation. Meaning that any random sample is as likely to be as good as any other. Even self selected people are often fine, as long as they can only vote once.
What happens is that people on either side of the issues cancel each other out, resulting in a pretty good result, as long as enough people answer. Even 500 people can result in an accurate enough poll. More than about 3,000 doesn't serve to up the quality.
I welcome this but I think it is overrated. Most people can type faster on the portrait keyboard. You cannot very efficiently type with two fingers on the landscape keyboard and for typing with one finger the keys are naturally further apart, which means you have to move around more, resulting in a slower typing speed. On the portrait keyboard I can hold the phone and type on it with the same hand, ie, I only need one hand. with the landscape keyboard, I need both hands.
Everyone is different, of course, but it's accepted that the best keyboards have the keys larger, and further apart. That increases the correct hit rate. I find typing with both thumbs much easier on the landscape keyboard. The best e-mail phones all have landscape keyboards, or keyboards that are wide in the vertical mode, such as the early Blackberrys.
Since a large number of people have been requesting this, it's obviously an issue.
Your point is taken, but I think you miss my point.
When I send an email on my iPhone, I bring up their contact info, I tap their email address, I start typing the message, I hit send.
When I send an SMS on my iPhone (were I to do so
From the use case POV, they're equivalent.
So, stay with me here... what if, when you put someone's number in, Address Book looked up their carrier, and added the correct email equivalent to the contact as well?
Now, to send an email to *their phone*, you'd perform the same steps as above. No worse than sending an SMS, and much MUCH more flexible.
Or, assume that they have an email address - I mean, who doesn't right? Now if they can access their email over their phone, you don't even have to use the SMS gateway. It's just another email client, like any other device on the internet. Much, much better.
The sooner phones support push mail, the sooner we can get away from this closed-wall network model.
Ok, I understand your proposal that Apple's Contact app does the legwork to send via SMS gateway. That makes sense. And is quite ingenious, really. The downside is that people (hopefully) want to get in touch with you, too. They will just send to your phone number from their simple text app on the free phone they got for signing the 2 year contract. No one is going to think, 'oh, I need to do something special to send a message to Kickaha, click, click, okay then...Now to send to Polymnia, I need to do it this other way...'
To be a proper replacement for the existing SMS/MMS system we need to be able to continue sending messages to eachother's phone numbers using a new PUSH service. Perhaps it will be an IMAP IDLE technology, but to be used by the masses it needs to be available by default on all new handsets.
Texting never took off in the US early on because carriers didn't play nice with each other. I tried texting my friends on an early SMS phone. I didn't work, mostly. Useless. I qquit trying to use it immdiately. A couple years later, the carriers worked the bugs out, everyone could talk to everyone and it took off like crazy.
I have the family messaging on my plan and all of the other phones on the plan get free MMS from AT&T
And how much do you pay for that optional service?
And how much do you pay for that optional service?
Unlimited messaging on a family plan for all phones, no matter how many, is $30 a month. We have that plan, but come no where close to making it pay.
Unlimited messaging on a family plan for all phones, no matter how many, is $30 a month. We have that plan, but come no where close to making it pay.
Ouch! $30/month just for messaging? I am content with my original iPhone with SMS messaging which was included in the $20 data plan. I have never had any reason to send an MMS message. However, families with teenagers are a different story.
MMS/SMS is simple and universal. No one needs to configure a server, their mobile, learn a recipient's carrier, etc to use MMS/SMS.
It is not universal. Email is more universal than texting. You need a cell phone to send or receive it, and many don't pay for text messaging, and therefore, don't use it. A lot of people I know don't use it and don't pay for it.
However, I do love your reference of the nerd website readers....I can imagine the poll question, "We recently polled a selection of nerds..." LOL
Email is certainly LESS universal on cell phones than text. There are still a lot of non-smart phones out there. Granted, some of them can send/receive email, but it is certainly a 3rd class application on these phones, a pain to use and unreliable. In certain circles email may be gaining traction but by and large, texting is the universal messaging format right now.
All this is changing and I like Kickaha's idea of phones automatically figuring out the proper configuration to send emails through an SMS/MMS gateway to people's phones to be delivered as SMS. That only replaces half the SMS traffic though (no more SMS originating at the handsets, but still just as many received). Maybe its a good enough stopgap to see us through until all phones handle email thru a push service. Then we can really stick a fork in SMS.
Email is certainly LESS universal on cell phones than text. There are still a lot of non-smart phones out there. Granted, some of them can send/receive email, but it is certainly a 3rd class application on these phones, a pain to use and unreliable. In certain circles email may be gaining traction but by and large, texting is the universal messaging format right now.
All this is changing and I like Kickaha's idea of phones automatically figuring out the proper configuration to send emails through an SMS/MMS gateway to people's phones to be delivered as SMS. That only replaces half the SMS traffic though (no more SMS originating at the handsets, but still just as many received). Maybe its a good enough stopgap to see us through until all phones handle email thru a push service. Then we can really stick a fork in SMS.
I should have clarified that email is more universal as a form of current communication. Almost everyone has an email address, regardless of how they can access it. Not as many people use texting as a form of general communcation.
I should have clarified that email is more universal as a form of current communication. Almost everyone has an email address, regardless of how they can access it. Not as many people use texting as a form of general communcation.
I see your point. Granted.
However, in the context of communicating via the written word using a mobile, SMS is by far the most popular way.
As long as we all agree some for of instantaneous, universal text messaging is an important service we need something like SMS. A more modern technological underpinning and less expense would be ideal. But the bottom line is that some system must fill this need.
Ouch! $30/month just for messaging? I am content with my original iPhone with SMS messaging which was included in the $20 data plan. I have never had any reason to send an MMS message. However, families with teenagers are a different story.
Our daughter gets hundreds a month. We find that when she's with her friends, she doesn't want to pick up the phone and talk, but she does respond to SMS.
Ouch! $30/month just for messaging? I am content with my original iPhone with SMS messaging which was included in the $20 data plan. I have never had any reason to send an MMS message. However, families with teenagers are a different story.
The $30 per month is for family texting unlimited includes SMS & MMS for all phones on the plan. I you have the $20 plan it would include MMS on your phone right now.
$5.00 / 250 = $0.02 Where did YOU learn to do math?
Irony likes that you corrected someone else's math wrong...
Because that price was for 250 SMS messages not MMS message, lets see what AT&T comes out with pricing for MMS/SMS messages.
Hopefully apps like Air Sharing and FileMagnet, can use the new in App Mail APIs to do just that.
I'll definetly keep my fingres crossed.
If that feature is coming to the iPhone I think I am only missing video capture :-)
The 2 things that I really missed are there.
Cut and paste and forwarding SMS.
It's not needed - it's just more convenient for some. At an anally-raping price. Knock yourself out, I'll be looking for the way to turn it off, since most of us in the US *can't* block them at the service provider, unlike the rest of the world.
Not all countries have expensive MMS. I'm in Australia, and i pay $3 (yes $3) a month for UNLIMITED MMS. You don't believe how infuriating it was not to be able to send of receive any. It's massive in this country.
What's the reasoning behind not supporting MMS on original iPhones? As a decision it seems arbitrary at best, given that my 2 year old phone I owned before I got my original iPhone 2 years ago supported it, its hard to believe that the original iPhone doesn't have the grunt to support such a simple feature.
I would lucky-guess the same reason Microsoft made Windows version of Halo 2 exclusively DX10 title. Considering that Halo 2 was original XboX game and should run fine on DX8 setup, only reason they did it (if you ignore their lame explanations that game actually does require DX10 to look it's best) was to force people upgrade to Vista.
Want MMS? No problem. All you need is new iPhone
Sales are down, people - every effort to push 'em up is a valid one