jducoeur

The text address should be the telephone number. My sister and I send each other text messages all the time on our cell phones.

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siderea

Why text instead of a call or email?

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A call would probably be the default, but she's out and about with clients/customers all day, so if I want to tell her something cute the kids have said, or whatever, sending a text message doesn't interrupt her.

It started when the kids pretty much nursed around the clock and I couldn't get to the computer often. But it's still useful. Often I'll send a text msg to a friend in CA when I'm out in the yard with the kids. It helps us feel more connected; a bit like LJ. One could ask why use LJ when one could phone friends or send them personal email.

I also text message my hubby to remind him it's almost time to come home (he gets into programmer-zone and forgets) and other things like that. We'll send each other messages when one of us is going to the store or the library, for other things to remember to pick up. This avoids some transcription errors. For example, I text msg'ed him the ISBN number of an additional book I wanted him to get at the library last week.

It's not for everyone. But it's somewhat useful and definitely fun, the things I do with it.

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siderea

One could ask why use LJ when one could phone friends or send them personal email.

One does, all the time. :) This is your local neighborhood amateur anthropologist, and local rep of

blog_sociology. Consider yourself an "informant". :)

So what sort of device are you using, and what sort of input method? Is it a phone? Or does it have a stylus (a la palm) or full keypad (a la blackberry)?

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I really like sociology questions. However, I don't think I'll go read that group, due to limited time.

I use a cell phone. Input via the keypad (number 2 also is ABC.) It's got a fairly sophisticated "predictive text."

For those that haven't heard the term, that's when you hit the right keys for your word without specifing which of the 3 letters you want, and it guesses from the aggregate. Same principle as those work phone directories where you hit the keys for the last name of the person you want.

It takes some getting used to, because you have to type blind (the interim words it guesses are usually wrong until you finish the word) and if you can't spell, it won't produce the word you want at all. So it's probably horribly frustrating to those folks.

I tried sending Justin a test text message after he posted, but I don't know if he got it or not.

One thing about text msgs, is that the companies don't guarantee they'll get there right away. *Ususally* my messages to my sister or the hubby go right away, but recently my sister has seen data dumps of the messages I sent, showing up at 10pm or so en masse.

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siderea

I really like sociology questions. However, I don't think I'll go read that group, due to limited time.

Alas, it isn't really all that. It tends to go in a tight little circle around topics which seem to largely spring from insecurity about the value of on-line relationships. (Gak!)

It takes some getting used to, because you have to type blind (the interim words it guesses are usually wrong until you finish the word) and if you can't spell, it won't produce the word you want at all. So it's probably horribly frustrating to those folks.

Or if you can't type too accurately. Hmm. This is probably not my ideal medium, then. :)

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Or if you can't type too accurately. Hmm. This is probably not my ideal medium, then. :)

Mind you, you only have 12 keys to mess up with, so it might not be so bad.

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You can turn off the predictive text, though. I don't have it on mine, and I certainly don't miss it.

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jducoeur

I tried sending Justin a test text message after he posted, but I don't know if he got it or not.

Hmm. Let's see...

(A couple of minutes later) Yep, got it. The problem, though, is that my cell phone is actually turned off most of the day.

I work in what amounts to a Faraday cage (the basement of a well-wired office building, which blocks cell signal quite effectively), and that's a bad thing for a CDMA phone -- the thing gets all hyper about trying to find a signal, and burns through the entire battery in about six hours. (This is one of those complaints I mentioned before.)

So the result is that I have to turn off the phone for the entire workday, and sometimes forget to turn it back on again afterwards. So truth to tell, my cellphone is *not* a very good way to get through to me in a timely way, except under a few circumstances. (

msmemory and I both largely use our cell phones to call each other at our land lines...)

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"finding signal"

Oh, yah, I understand. We had Sprint's network for a while in PA. Their network, at least two years ago, was full of holes. Sitting stationary on the table, it was constantly beeping to tell you "have lost network signal" then a minute later "found network signal."

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jducoeur

In general, I've been reasonably pleased by the network in the immediate Boston area -- I tend to only hit holes deep inside buildings, and not often then. But my desk is a worst-case scenario: not just deep inside a building, but in the basement, under all the wiring and pretty close to the earth on one side. I don't hold that particular signal dropout against them: most carriers don't work well in that spot.

I agree that Sprint's network is generally not as good on coverage as some, which is why

msmemory is on Verizon -- she does a lot more distant commuting, so she needs a more reliable carrier. For me, I was drawn by the Treo (the combination of phone plus PDA-with-keyboard was exactly what I wanted), and Sprint looked far better in every respect than T-Mobile, the other alternative. (Which had worse coverage, poor sales service, and an unimpressive plan.)

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Didn't realize you had Sprint. With luck, their network is better now. Another fun aspect was that Sprint didn't have whatever treaties were needed to share airspace, so if we were at one of the nearby malls, our calls sometimes wouldn't go through unless we provided a credit card number for the other company to charge!

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Didn't realize you had Sprint. With luck, their network is better now.

Supposedly, yeah; they've built a lot more capacity over the past year or two. (This is what a Sprint saleguy claimed when I went shopping for phones for my parents, anyway.)

our calls sometimes wouldn't go through unless we provided a credit card number for the other company to charge!

Plus, when that happened, we were in analog mode, which meant that sniffing the credit card number would've been trivial.

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Sprint looked far better in every respect than T-Mobile, the other alternative. (Which had worse coverage, poor sales service, and an unimpressive plan.)

FWIW, I used to have Sprint, Verizon, and currently have T-Mobile. I'm sure Sprint's improved over the last two years, since that was when I last had them. At the time, though, Sprint really had building penetration issues, particularly in my apartment. You see this more on 1900 MHz signals (e.g. Sprint and T-Mobile) than on 800 MHz signals (e.g. Verizon, around here), generally. I have much better coverage inside my apartment with T-Mobile (and Verizon, when I had them) than I ever did with Sprint. Coverage with T-Mobile is excellent within the city, and along highways. I typically only lose coverage when I'm in rural areas, away from highways. On my recent trip to and around Florida, I never noticed that my phone didn't have coverage. I still have my old Verizon phone in the car, for emergencies, In case I need to dial 911 from someplace that T-Mobile doesn't have coverage, and for the rest, I find T-Mobile's coverage fine. I find the voice quality on T-Mobile's GSM network to be much better than either Sprint's or Verizon's CDMA network, though admittedly, my CDMA phones all had the older voice codecs, which have been improved, I hear. The other attraction with T-Mobile was that their data plans are much cheaper than anyone else's, and while I'm not a heavy user, the occasional use I make of mobile data would be prohibitively expensive with anyone else.

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jducoeur

The other attraction with T-Mobile was that their data plans are much cheaper than anyone else's, and while I'm not a heavy user, the occasional use I make of mobile data would be prohibitively expensive with anyone else.

Actually, I rather like Sprint's pay-one-price Internet plan. The plan I currently have (which is sort of midrange in the typical cell price scale, IIRC) is unlimited Internet usage. In fact, that seemed to be the norm for Sprint nowadays -- I think they've decided to simply treat the IP traffic as a loss leader, and not worry about quantifying it...

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I understand Sprint's data plans are not bad, if you're strictly using the mobile device to access data. I've heard (though haven't verified) that the TOS prohibits using them for tethered data (i.e. connecting a laptop to the net through them). When Sprint introduced the SE T608 a few months back, they said that the normally unlimited Vision data plan would be capped at 3 MB/month, because the phone's Bluetooth connectivity made it too easy to connect to a laptop.

The option I have with T-Mobile is unlimited data, and while it's primarily geared toward WAP and other mobile device access, they don't disallow tethered data. Some ports are blocked, but the basics for web surfing and mail retrieval are there. At $5/month, I've seen nothing from any other cell carrier that comes close. They also have a full access, all ports open, and they expect you to connect computers through it plan, that costs $20/month, which seems to be about 1/4 what that goes for from any of the other carriers (except, possibly, Sprint).

This nice thing here is I can take my laptop, and connect wirelessly to the net via the Bluetooth phone that I don't even have to take out of my purse or connect a cable to. Since voice and data use different channels, I can actively use the net connection while placing and receiving voice calls, too.

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Why text instead of a call or email?

One common reason for Cynthia & me is that a text message is less of an intrusion than a call--especially if the recipient is driving. If I get a text message when driving, or when in a meeting, I can ignore it until I have the computrons available to deal with it.

Also, text messages don't incur roaming charges (with AT&T, anyway); this is useful when we're out of town.

Oh, also also, Cynthia and I have extra email addresses set up that forward to the phone and to our regular email addresses; a message sent to one of these aliases might get truncated when it goes to the phone, but the full message will still be available in email. The upshot is that it's not necessarily a choice between phone and email.

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Text messages are reportedly a much bigger deal in Europe and Asia, than they are in North America. Apparently, there are two reasons, pricing and ease. Over there, mobile minutes for voice calls are reportedly more expensive than here, while text messages are very cheap, or even free. This is in contrast to here, where most people have plans with minute allowances that let them talk as much as they care to, but have to pay extra for SMS messages. On the ease front, SMS in most places works seamlessly, as long as you have the phone number of the recipient. In the US, it only works that way if the recipient is on the same carrier as you. If not, you have to include some carrier specific routing, and consequently have to know which carrier the recipient uses. And the US companies wonder why it's not catching on over here...

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In the US, it only works that way if the recipient is on the same carrier as you. If not, you have to include some carrier specific routing, and consequently have to know which carrier the recipient uses.

That's largely not the case any more, actually; as of, enh, 1-2 years ago, most (all?) large carriers now interconnect seamlessly.

Still, yes, that used to be a problem. The rest of the world probably got a jump on interconnection because they were all GSM, so they didn't have the same technical hurdles to get through. Oh, and, if carriers weren't charging for text messages, then they had no motivation to refrain from interconnecting.

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You are right that this has largely been fixed. I was remembering the situation from a few years back, and seeing the current fuss over intercarrier MMS (picture messaging, mostly), which is even worse, and conflating the two. Still, there are reports of poor performance across carrier boundaries, that are solved in carrier specific ways, even for current SMS. But by default, it should be working now.

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