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.