SMS is required + fix for battery drained isse

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Dec 5, 2007 12:18 AM, flexd <flexd at doombox.org> wrote:
> Richard Reichenbacher wrote:
> > Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> >> On Dec 4, 2007 5:45 PM, Bernhard Kaindl <bkaindl at ffii.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Maybe it is enough for the US, but if you define the average European
> >>> mobile phone user a part of "mass", then you are wrong and yes, text
> >>> text messaging (SMS) is an absolute requirement for European mobile
> >>>
> >>
> >> Plenty of people use SMS in the US too, especially teenagers.  More
> >> would use it if certain GSM carriers didn't charge extra for each
> >> individual message, both sending and receiving (shame on you TMobile
> >> in this regard).
> >
> > I have T-Mobile and I pay $10 a month for unlimited text and mms.  Not
> > all that expensive.
>
> I pay less than 0.12478098 U.S. dollars per SMS message. And that's with
> a crappy expensive one here in norway (Cash caller card thingy, pay $45
> use it all to call/send, but sort of pricey calling).
>
> What are T-mobiles prices per sms?

$0.10 to send and $0.01 to receive.  The point is, SMS costs them next
to nothing - it's so little data.  A voice call is much more
data-intensive and requires real-time performance.  Yet they give us
hundreds of minutes of voice usage (which my wife and I never use even
half of) for one price and then charge extra for tiny little SMS
packets.  If you are a teenager sending dozens of SMS's per day it
adds up.  And unlimited GPRS (aka TZones) is $5.95, so with the Neo
(someday) I'd rather use jabber.  There could be a jabber server which
acts as an SMS gateway, in case you try to send a message to someone
who's not connected to jabber.  Then at least you don't pay the fee to
send the message, and the recipient phone doesn't pay to receive
either as long as it is also connected.

But I wonder how they would react if some phones started staying
connected to GPRS all the time (but not necessarily using much
bandwidth).

I remember reading once that somebody had implemented TCP over SMS, in
case you have the opposite problem.  :-)  (unlimited SMS and expensive
GPRS)