- It is easy and immediate, although it is asynchronous
- It is dirty cheap, much less than a voice call
What kills me is that the mobile operators are taking away #2!! Today Verizon raised the price of a single text to 20 cents, following Sprint (mind you foolish Europeans, it is both for sending and receiving message ;-) Just a bit more than a year ago, the price was 10 cents, then they raised to 15 cents, now it is 20 cents. A 100% increase in a year...
Are they insane??
Maybe. They are simply pushing everybody to buy a bundle. If you are a bundle user, you are going to send a lot more text messages (who cares, they use zero bandwidth), which will be sent to a lot of people. Some of them (most?) will be receivers without a bundle: THEY will pay double (a bundle...). Evil.
But they might be pushing towards the wrong one. In a short time, people won't buy SMS bundles, they will buy a data plan and they will use mobile email instead. They are just accelerating the transition, pushing to make themselves a dumb pipe...
Time to say goodbye to texting, at least in the US.