How long till the SMS is dead?
Posted by Yannis Lionis on 27 Feb 2008 at 12:48 am | Tagged as: Internet
While sailing in a sea of flight cancellations and alterations last week, I needed to monitor two different flights, and followed an ad for a website that promised to do exactly that. I registered for a free service that would send me notifications for both these flights and had an impressive collection of airports and airlines it covers (www.flightstats.com). I got a bit disappointed that I could only get the email notifications for free and SMS had to be paid for, but was not surprised. After all, SMS costs money, email is free.
And then I thought twice. I have a PDA and receive my emails instantaneously. The SMS notification would give me no more prompt feedback than the email (apart from the slightly more attention-demanding ringtone). It would actually be limiting the notification in terms of length of the message, whereas email can be a bit more verbose.
So how long till SMS dies? The more people have devices that do email (easily), the less meaning SMS will have. Apart from the possibility of Instant-Messaging style applications on mobile devices that would serve the same purpose, just plain old email will serve the purpose of instant, short-message communication just fine. Perception of the instant nature of SMS in contrast with the usual delays in reading and replying to emails will change as email will be just as instantaneous, and SMS will have little or no reason to exist.
The end is nigh (well, a good two or three decades away perhaps, but definitely in our lifetime) for the SMS…
3 Responses to “How long till the SMS is dead?”
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one advantage sms has over email, in pure network terms, disregarding cost, is that it uses a lower level network, that requires less battery power, and less space on the ‘pipe’ than email. if you think of sms as being an async queueing system for sending messages to occasionally connected wireless devices - which in network terms is what it is - then I think, like the pstn, it will be around for a while.
until GSM is replaced with a pure IP network, we will need sms. indeed when your crackberry or winmobile (v6) phone receives an email from exchange, it’s been told to do so over an sms channel. server sends an sms - though to a different port in the phone to the one messages for humans are intended - that wakes the phone up, it connects to the internet and collects messages. compare and contrast to the iphone, which polls over the internet constantly. leading to shorter battery life, and shock data bills…
I know which i’d rather…
Fair point San1t1, but as bandwidth approaches free, the polling strategy poses less of an issue and doesn’t require Microshaft SW on the other side. Although to call the iPhone ‘open’ is also laughable.
@Yannis,
you make an interesting point but alas there is an error in your assertions, contrary to our initial estimations, adoptions of always on mobile internet devices are progressing at a much slower pace.
The “web” has existed on phones for a while now and yet, only recently has email reached any sort of usable state, this coupled with the fact that the mobile phone is the default screen for 1/3 of the world’s population and growing daily means the death of SMS is far from being just around the corner.
@san1t1,
crackberry/winmobile only supports email from one specific server type while your icrack uses IMAP and thus works across multiple email servers.