Escape iPhone Texting Fees With AOL’s IM Client
Steve Jobs touted the iPhone 2.0’s $200 price until he was blue in the face, but anyone paying any attention at all quickly noticed that AT&T is making up the difference by upping the price of SMS messages.
Under the new plans you pay $5 per month for 200 messages (which is what was included with the original plan), $15 per month for 1500 messages, or $20 per month for unlimited messages. Given that data is much easier on the network than voice, SMS has to be one of the bigger scams the telcos are currently running (and not just for the iPhone).
It may not be rocket science, but Jeff Carlson over at Tidbits has a tip to avoid exorbitant fees — use AOL’s free instant message client for iPhone 2.0. For those not using an iPhone, IMing instead of texting is old news, but now iPhone users can get in on the money saving fun.
Yes, I know, it’s AOL. Trust me, this is the one and only time I’ll suggest using AOL software, but in this case it works like a charm and can save you a bundle. Tidbits has a complete instructions in the article, but the short take is that you just the AOL client for all your text messaging.
It’s a little more work perhaps, but if you’re a heavy text messenger it could save you quite a bit of money. In fact, over two years it could save you as much as $480 — which is probably more than enough to cover the cost of iPhone 3.0.
[via Slashdot]
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