American carrier AT&T is planning on eliminating its $10 a month messaging (a thousand text messages) come this Sunday. Instead, they’re forcing pricier plans upon new iPhone customers. In their vocabulary, it’s only a “streamlining”, a spokesperson for AT&T told Engadget:
It is obvious the new plans work towards milking iPhone customers for extra profits. Let’s not forget they in January AT&T had also killed $5 and $15 messaging plans. Additionally, their pay-per-message options are clearly overpriced at twenty cents for a text message and thirty cents for a media-rich MMS. Fortunately, carrier-controlled messaging is a dying dinosaur as come this Fall…
…we will have iOS 5 which includes iMessage, Apple’s new messaging platform enabling free exchange of text and multimedia messages between iOS devices (only carrier data charges may apply). Plus, there’s Google Voice, a smart telephony service from Google that lets you text non-Apple phones, including Android handsets, free of charge. Looks like nobody will shed a tear over AT&T’s text messaging plans and if BlackBerry Messenger is any indication, a lot of youngsters – and everyone, for that matter – are going to love free of charge messaging in iOS 5.
