I don't care if "the iphone SMS pricing plan is now consistent with our other mobile device's pricing plans" with the addition of a fee for text messaging. It's absurd that anyone should be charging for a service that is probably all but 100% profit. As John Gruber pointed out over at Daring Fireball a while back, SMS on AT&T is the most expensive bandwidth on earth! This is legalized theft by taking. This is the convenience tax. This is a rip off.
So, I hope all of those 1,000,000 new iPhone purchasers (and that's just over the weekend) will not purchase SMS from AT&T and will not touch the SMS button on the iPhone. Instead, download the free AOL chat client from the iTunes Apps Store and follow these simple directions from our friends at TidBITS. You can SMS for free off AT&Ts 3G network!
Let's see, more or less, 1,000,000 new iPhone plans using the $5.00 per month SMS plan at AT&T: that's a $5,000,000 windfall every month! Now, certainly this isn't scientifically calculated, but it's probably in the ball park. While it's 1,000,000 new iPhone users, some upgraded their phones I'm sure, but not all of them went with the least expensive ($5/month) SMS plan. So I suspect it all comes out in the $5 million range per month--give or take a few hundred thousand.
I noticed over the weekend a huge number of full page ads by the other mobile carriers, even multiple pages by the same carrier in the same day's paper! They have got to be losing market share! Verizon should have had more sense when Apple first offered them the deal, because I don't care far giant corporate AT&T! Now, if I really did have "more bars in more places" maybe I would feel different about them.
As I have groused before, this is just the old AT&T monopoly acting like its old self!
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