What is this place?

a warm gun is the personal web site of multimedia artist and resident geek Ian Adams, based out of Seattle, WA. Within the site, this page is a blog entry filed under Apple. 3 comments have been left here by readers since this entry was posted on the 28th 2007f June 2007, and you are welcome to leave one of your own.

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The most recently posted stuff can be found on the front page. Older posts and articles are listed, by category and date, in the archives. There is also the Link Blog, which is my (almost) daily list of interesting links and brief commentary on AWG-related topics.

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Thursday, 28 June 2007

iPhone thoughts

Random thoughts on the iPhone at 11:40 on the night before the launch:

By making most plans include unlimited SMS messages, Apple took the emphasis of SMS on the iPhone pricing plans completely out of the picture, placing them instead on how many voice minutes you get. Once the iPhones are out in the wild, Apple has total control of the platform. This means that AT&T has no incentive to block Apple from introducing an iChat client as a free software update at a later date, because they’re already not making any money off of SMS texting. The argument that AT&T wants to keep iChat off of the iPhone because they’re afraid it will take away money from SMS texting is dead in the water. I believe it’s inevitable that we’re going to see instant messaging on the iPhone.

Apple

3 comments

Daniel Andrews @ 29/6/2007, 4:23 am

Unless I’m missing something, the ‘default’ iPhone plans are limited to 200 SMS per month:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/easysetup/rateplans.html

Now, I’m already an AT&T customer, and have a plan with 1000 SMS a month for a pretty reasonable rate. So if/when I get an iPhone, I’ll simply have to pony up the $20/mo for the data … but I haven’t seen talk of unlimited SMS anywhere. I don’t even think AT&T offers unlimited SMS.

Ian Adams @ 29/6/2007, 6:52 am

You know what? You’re absolutely right! I was looking at the wrong row (the “night and weekend minutes” row). It does look like they’ve made it $20 to upgrade to unlimited SMS messages, which does create an incentive for AT&T to upsell their SMS package rather than have something which would circumvent that revenue stream.

Thanks for pointing that out! :)

Daniel Andrews @ 29/6/2007, 10:46 am

I started scouring the net after you posted that, as I thought there was a new announcement. I’ve seen some pretty cool proof-of-concept AIM apps on the web for use with the iPhone, but it might be a while before we see a true iChat… which is too bad. Between that and the notoriously slow EDGE speeds, that’s why I’m going to wait and see how this all goes before jumping in.