I prefer IM over email for most things – it provides a record of my conversations for reference (something lacking with phone calls) while still maintaining a level of interactivity that isn’t quite there through email. It lets me converse with a group or simply one to one, and allows easy file/data exchanges to take place as a part of it. It is ideally suited for the way I interact with people both personally and professionally.
Because the iPhone lacks an Instant Messaging application (where’s iChat?!), I’ve started to use texting (SMS) a lot more. While SMS certainly isn’t something new, it isn’t something I’ve used consistently in the past, and I wanted to throw out my perspective on using it vs. my experience with IM.
One of the nicest things about SMS is that it works using mobile phone numbers – not specific user handles. This means that I have the ability to exchange text messages with most of the 600 or so people in my phone directory instead of just the 80 people or so I actually have IM handles for. It’s also an open standard that works across phone manufactures and wireless providers, making it a more universal way to ping somebody.
My buddy list is my phone book…
Unlike many phones that fold SMS into their email interface, the iPhone actually makes SMS look pretty much like their iChat IM application – an elegantly designed conversational interface. But there are some differences.
Unlike instant messaging, SMS doesn’t provide any indication of who is busy, offline, available, etc. And while that might seem to be a big deal feature, it really isn’t in practice. For IM’ing, it’s useful to know if someone isn’t online at all, but even if they appear to be ‘available’, I still need to check with a quick “Good time to chat?..” message to make sure they have the time.
Overall, I find SMS to work really well for a lot of what I need to do.
But there are a couple of significant drawbacks…
Despite the fact that I have an “all you can eat” data plan, SMS messages are not included in it. I need to pony up an additional $20/month for unlimited text messages – even though they are clearly just tiny data packets . Not only that, but people pay not just to send text messages but to receive them as well. If I want to have a texting conversation with someone, they will be charged for each message they send and receive – and so will I!.
It is double billing at its finest…
The other downside to SMS is that it really is designed as a person to person service – not a group messaging service. Though there are creative hacks that will let me broadcast a message out to multiple people, there isn’t a clean way to have a group of friends interacting together through SMS they way they could via IM. This is something I now find I need to drop back to using email to handle.
I also need email for file exchanges. The iPhone doesn’t really work with files outside of email, and SMS doesn’t support it even if it did. MMS isn’t supported on the iPhone either (at least not yet), but it really wouldn’t make much of a difference outside of exchanging photos/media files that most phones would know how to handle.
Clearly Email isn’t going away, but it has definitely moved into the legacy camp for me. When all else fails, I know i can use email.
So what will I do when Apple finally has iChat on the iPhone?…
I’ll end up using both SMS and iChat.
My time with SMS has really sold me. It works great (cost aside) for quick one-to-one text exchanges, and I can reach so many more people through it than I can using IM. The fact that it is natively mobile make it much more useful as well. Almost everyone will carry their phone with them all the time, making it far easier to reach people when I need them, and in a less intrusive way than with a phone call.
It would be great if both IM and SMS could be combined into a hybrid application that could bridge the two models and give me a “best of both worlds” solution.
That would be a great feature for the next iPhone upgrade…