A post on Silicon Alley two days ago regarding AT&T’s different iPhone plans caught my attention. Dan Frommer, writes that AT&T is “screwing its customers by not offering a text message plan in between their 200/$5 and 1500/$15.” But this is not a problem since there will be “a handful of instant messaging apps” released on the 11th.
The iPhone which, without doubt, has moved the ball down the field as far as smartphones are concerned, I believe is about to change the way all of us do real time synchronous communication via our mobile device. Since most if not all people will have unlimited data with the iPhone, it makes more sense to use a messaging client rather than pay per SMS. Messaging clients bring with it, presence, rich-text messages, user customization, such as status, avatars, etc, a familiar experience, and most importantly the ability to do advanced features like photo sharing and file transfer, both of which cannot be done via MMS since it is not supported on the iPhone right now.
SMS is not going away over night, but the iPhone will make it more attractive to NOT use SMS because the IM clients for the phone will be very good. I am looking forward to seeing what RIM and Android can churn out to keep up. As I wrote yesterday, here at AOL, we have a very nice AIM client for the Windows Mobile Platform.
I’m not entirely convinced Apple’s solution to apps running in the background is gonna work…here’s hoping.
Also, I hope the new AIM client for iPhone supports picture sharing. Agile Messenger does it although a slightly different way as it uploads the photo to a site where the recipient must click a link to view it. Even if AIM did this I wouldn’t mind…it would also be kind of neat to have an online storage area for my photos this way (assuming the photos were stored on AIM photos or in XDrive or something).
I use AIM on my phone, but I use a client that runs via SMS (the included Oz client from AT&T). Data clients are nice, but they kill the battery where as I can leave my client connected all day without much concern for battery life.