Martin O’Donnell sent me a test SMS message from his T-Mobile Sidekick II yesterday. When I received the message I replied, then I thought that I wasn’t sure how many SMS messages my new Cingular billing plan included, so I texted, “Let me find out about SMS and I’ll get back to you.”
I called 611 and asked. I found out that my billing plan has zero included SMS messages and each message costs me $0.10. If I want to buy SMS message packages, the prices are as follows:
- $2.99 for 50 messages per month
- $4.99 for 200 messages per month
- $9.99 for 1000 messages per month
- $19.99 for 2500 messages per month
It doesn’t make sense that the unlimited PDA data plan doesn’t have any included SMS messages, while the Cingular MEdia Net plans (which cost substantially less) include SMS messages.
I’m still thinking about what I’m going to do. I may choose to run an Instant Messaging client on my Treo 650 that channels its communication over the EDGE network. The problem is that some of the people with whom I communicate by mobile phone don’t use IM.