Text Messaging Basics | Treo Essentials

Text messaging is a highly efficient means of mobile communication and in many ways is competing with voice telephony communication. It's often easier to receive a text message and reply to it at your own convenience than answer a live voice call and deal with an issue in real time. This is the primary reason that so many business users have adopted the BlackBerry platform as their mobile communication devices of choice. With the Treo, Palm aims to take the success of the BlackBerry platform to a broader range of users. Traditionally, most BlackBerry devices have been pure text-messaging pagers. So with the exception of a few newer BlackBerry phones, there's the added benefit of Treo devices combining the features of a mobile phone and a text-messaging pager.

One potential source of confusion with respect to Treo devices and text messages has to do with exactly what constitutes a text message. Obviously, you know it must contain text, but so do Word documents and web pages, and they aren't considered text messages. A text message is a message consisting purely of text (and possibly attached files) that's sent electronically over a network from one place to another. Treo devices support the following primary types of text messages:

Email message A text message addressed to an email address and sent through a wireless service provider or an email server. Can accept attachments.
Short Message Service (SMS) message A text message addressed to a phone number or special code and sent through a wireless service provider. Cannot accept attachments.
Multimedia message• A text message addressed to a phone number or special code and sent through a wireless service provider with attached media objects, such as voice memos, pictures, and video clips.
Instant message A text message sent in the context of a live conversation between two connected parties; instant messages are sent and received through a client instant-messaging application (AOL Instant Messenger, for example). Can accept attachments based on the client application.

The most important point to remember from this list of text message types is the distinction between the first three (email, SMS, and multimedia messages) and the last one (instant message). The distinction is that an instant message involves the notion of a live connection between two parties; the other types of messages are delivered regardless of whether anyone is on the other end to receive them when they are sent. This distinction might seem minor, but it makes a huge difference in terms of how instant messages are handled compared to email, SMS, and multimedia messages. More specifically, the standard Treo Messaging application handles email, SMS, and multimedia messages together in a seamless manner, but it doesn't handle instant messages at all. However, you can use the Messaging application to carry on chat threads that resemble true instant messaging; you can also download and install a true instant-messaging client as a third-party application.

Note

All wireless service providers are free to use their own solutions for supporting multimedia messaging. Most providers use the popular Multimedia Messaging System (MMS); others, such as Sprint, use their own system. The Sprint system, called PictureMail, involves using a web page for accessing attached media objects online as opposed to actually attaching objects to an MMS message.

Now that you understand the distinction between instant messages and the other three main types of text messages, it's worth taking just a moment to cover the differences between email, SMS, and multimedia messages. As you might already know, email messages are routed through email servers and often traverse a variety of network and computer configurations along the way. Email messages are addressed to email addresses by using the familiar name@domainname format, which most people are familiar with. SMS and multimedia messages are different from email messages both in terms of how they are delivered and how they are addressed.

SMS and multimedia messages are peer-to-peer messages, which means they don't go through a server in the same way that email does. Instead, they are sent directly from one device to another one, much like a phone call is made directly from one mobile phone to another one. Moreover, SMS and multimedia messages are sent solely through your wireless service provider. The only significant differences, at least from the user's perspective, between these two message types is the support for attached media objects and the maximum message size (160 characters) imposed on SMS messagesthere's no standard maximum size for MMS messages.

Note

You must have a mobile phone number (SMS address) associated with a contact for the contact to be used as an SMS message recipient.

SMS is a text-messaging protocol that allows you to send messages to people by simply specifying the phone number of their handheld device. SMS messages can be sent to anyone with a mobile device that supports SMS, and your mobile phone number serves as your unique ID for SMS messaging. So if a mobile phone or handheld is capable of SMS messaging, you send the owner a message by simply addressing the message to his or her mobile phone number. The same thing applies to multimedia messaginga mobile phone number serves as the target address for messages.

Note

With a few exceptions, such as SMS services that use short codes, SMS addresses are typically just mobile phone numbers. A short code is a special SMS address that's typically a four-, five-, or six-digit number. Short codes are usually assigned to special wireless services, such as Google SMS, and are sometimes used for special promotions. For example, the television show American Idol uses a short code that viewers can use to vote on show participants via SMS.

What makes SMS particularly useful for Treo devices is that it provides a way to communicate with people who use traditional mobile phones that don't have full-blown email access. Although SMS is somewhat new to American mobile phone users, its widespread success in other parts of the world give it a stable and interesting base of applications that are available to all SMS users.

The success of SMS has spawned some neat applications and services that you might not have realized existed. For example, one of my favorite SMS applications is Google SMS, which enables you to carry out a Google search purely through SMS messages. You send an SMS message with your search keywords, and Google returns several messages to you with the search results. Google SMS is a simple and elegant application of SMS and a great example of how to make a popular service available to mobile devices.