Text Message saves lives!

We all know them and hate them. The random text messages sent by your cellular carrier announcing random offers. They tend to come at inopportune times and set off your phone in the middle of the night. But in Russia, one such text message may have saved hundreds of lives. How long until AT&T is advertising them as "anti-terrosist services" and charging a fee for them?

A "Black Widow" suicide bomber planned a terrorist attack in central Moscow on New Year's Eve but was killed when an unexpected text message set off her bomb too early, according to Russian security sources...Security sources believe a message from her mobile phone operator wishing her a happy new year received just hours before the planned attack triggered her suicide belt, killing her at a safe house.

Spell Check

Blocking Text Message SPAM

CNET has done us all a great service by putting together a summary of the ways to block text message spam for all of the major cell phone providers. Text message spam is worse than e-mail spam because most users are paying for each one in and out. And advertisers know the value of text message spam because it is hard to ignore. Click on thru to see how to deal with this plague on your provider of choice.

Stupid Criminals

My mother loves the "stupid criminals" features on Jay Leno's show, so she is sure to enjoy this story. An Ohio man had his car stolen, along with his cell phone. A friend, on a whim, sent a text message to the stolen phone pretending to have "hot chicks and drugs". He then sent an address to meet at, which the criminals rushed to reach. The police were there instead. The following has to be my favorite line from the story...

And to make things easier for the officers, the suspects showed up in the stolen car.

Text Messages are expensive because...

...uh... well... It must be because of the scarcity of bandwidth, right? After all, more cell phones means less lines available, right? Right?

But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping — and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. “Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume,” he said. “It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million.”

It is bad news for cell phone companies that the NYTimes has up an exposé on text messaging and the unreasonable rates that most cell carriers are charging. Is this perhaps why Apple has resisted advertising much about its own text messaging plans for the iPhone, and instead focusses on e-mail?

Fuzzy math

I found this interesting.  Apparently text messaging isn't the best deal on the web - if you don't have an unlimited plan.  Basically text messages on AT&T cost $1,310.72 per megabyte (6,553.6 text messages at $0.20 each).  Hmmm.... and the reason Sean doesn't text message is?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Free text messaging via Yahoo Mail!

Yahoo has apparently upgraded their webmail and part of the experience is free text messaging to phones in the USA and Canada!

The new Yahoo! Mail enables people to select how they want to communicate with their online contacts: via e-mail, instant message or text message to a mobile phone number. With the introduction of this text messaging feature, which is built on Yahoo!’s IM platform, people can now choose to send free text messages from Yahoo! Mail to mobile numbers in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines in real-time without leaving the Web mail experience. The feature is seamlessly incorporated into the new Yahoo! Mail, and is as easy as entering a mobile phone number, typing a text message and hitting send.

Very cool. And for iPhone users, an easy way around the 200-per-month limit on your AT&T text messages. Of course, it is only free on the SENDING side. Per-message charges may still exist on the RECIEVING side, so be sure to check before you send.

Free Text Messaging Possibilities

One of the downsides of AT&T/iPhone vs the T-Mobile/Sidekick is that you only get 200 text messages a month from AT&T while T-Mobile provides unlimited text messages. While most months this will be no problem, some months 200 may come awfully fast. In preparation for that possibility, I have been collecting different methods for text messaging that are 100% free (Assuming you already have an internet connection).

If you know the provider of your target, you can use these sites to text message them for free:
T-Mobile: Click here
Verizon: Click here
Sprint: Click here
Universal Sender App: Click here

To send a Text message via e-mail:
AT&T Wireless: [cellnumber]@txt.att.net
T-Mobile: [cellnumber]@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: [cellnumber]@vmobl.com
Sprint: [cellnumber]@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: [cellnumber]@vtext.com
Nextel: [cellnumber]@messaging.nextel.com

[cellnumber] = your full phone number including area code. For example 123-456-7890 would be 1234567890@txt.att.net