Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
sorry for bringing back this old thread... but how did people get imessage in the first place when its not even out?
 
I know 0 people with Whatsapp and many with iPhones. The the speed of a seconds or two doesn't bother me much.

on the contrary, i have over 60 contacts that use whatsapp. I use it everyday, its quicker than iMessage too.
 
One is an updated full version, the other is still a beta, which means it will be updated with faster and better service.

The question here is that both have pros and cons, and that's it.
 
i didnt read the whole thread but i can safely say that whatsapp is much faster than imessage. i hope the speed of imessage is increased. whatsapp is instantaneous and i applaud the way it works. imessage will probably be more solid once gm is released.
 
i didnt read the whole thread but i can safely say that whatsapp is much faster than imessage. i hope the speed of imessage is increased. whatsapp is instantaneous and i applaud the way it works. imessage will probably be more solid once gm is released.

When you say whatsapp is instant are you taking into account opening the app up up as well? On my 3GS it can take upto 10 secs sometimes to connect to the network and load (deleting threads can help this but not ideal). I know that it is not entirely WhatsApp's fault but i have to agree with some of the other guys here in that it is far from the best designed app. An integrated solution would be very welcomed from my point of view. From your experience (or anyone elses) does imessage just open up like the iOS4 messages app, ie no 'connecting' waiting etc? If it does then WhatsApp will be significantky slower in comparison
 
Last edited:
When you say whatsapp is instant are you taking into account opening the app up up as well? On my 3GS it can take upto 10 secs sometimes to connect to the network and load (deleting threads can help this but not ideal). I know that it is not entirely WhatsApp's fault but i have to agree with some of the other guys here in that it is far from the best designed app. An integrated solution would be very welcomed from my point of view. From your experience (or anyone elses) does imessage just open up like the iOS4 messages app, ie no 'connecting' waiting etc? If it doesn't then WhatsApp will be significantky slower in comparison

Agreed.

Whatsapp has served its purpose well enough, but I can't wait to use iMessage. Every person who I talk to on whatsapp is on iOS, so I don't care that iMessage isn't cross-platform.

There is group messaging in iMessages, right?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

I hadn't realised iMessage defaulted to sending via data connection. Can this be changed/customised? As someone pointed out, txts by SMS are usually unlimited. In the UK, data is generally capped at around 1GB or less.

So unless sending MMS or using my phone abroad over wifi, I wouldn't be so happy about using data in preference to SMS.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

I hadn't realised iMessage defaulted to sending via data connection. Can this be changed/customised? As someone pointed out, txts by SMS are usually unlimited. In the UK, data is generally capped at around 1GB or less.

So unless sending MMS or using my phone abroad over wifi, I wouldn't be so happy about using data in preference to SMS.

Surely this is only relavant if you send an awful lot of photos and videos. A single text imessage cant be more than a few Kb max so you would have to be sending an enormous amount before you even racked up just a couple of MB?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

jongriff said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

I hadn't realised iMessage defaulted to sending via data connection. Can this be changed/customised? As someone pointed out, txts by SMS are usually unlimited. In the UK, data is generally capped at around 1GB or less.

So unless sending MMS or using my phone abroad over wifi, I wouldn't be so happy about using data in preference to SMS.

Surely this is only relavant if you send an awful lot of photos and videos. A single text imessage cant be more than a few Kb max so you would have to be sending an enormous amount before you even racked up just a couple of MB?

Quite possibly, but it means that the unlimited txt packages are now essentially worthless if you have an iPhone. For those who bump along their data cap every month then this just means that the precious data is being used for something else. For prolific txters, this would be an issue. I guess this is another case of "Apple knowing best" if you can't change the default behaviour.

I guess I'm saying "if it ain't broke, why fix it".
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)



Quite possibly, but it means that the unlimited txt packages are now essentially worthless if you have an iPhone. For those who bump along their data cap every month then this just means that the precious data is being used for something else. For prolific txters, this would be an issue. I guess this is another case of "Apple knowing best" if you can't change the default behaviour.

I guess I'm saying "if it ain't broke, why fix it".

It only 'defaults' to iMessage-over-data if you're sending to another iOS 5 device. So unless every single person you send texts to uses an iPad or iPhone w/iOS 5, your text package isn't 'worthless'.

The whole iMessage thing seems to have confused a lot of folks. All the comparisons to BBM are absurd. If anything's like BBM, it's Whatsapp (albeit cross platform); it's an actual, separate app from the SMS app w/a different interface/feature set.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

Ah ok thanks for clarifying.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

I hadn't realised iMessage defaulted to sending via data connection. Can this be changed/customised? As someone pointed out, txts by SMS are usually unlimited. In the UK, data is generally capped at around 1GB or less.

So unless sending MMS or using my phone abroad over wifi, I wouldn't be so happy about using data in preference to SMS.

You can disable 'iMessages' by going to Settings > Messages and switching iMessages to 'off'. Turning it off will have your phone use only SMS/MMS.
 
I know that iMessage is still in beta, but I've notice an issue when testing this with my girlfriend yesterday. Both of our iPhone 4s have iOS 5 beta 6 installed. When I send her a message, she reads it, and the status still says delivered even though she read it. It shows that bubble which means that she's typing a message, but she isn't. It's kind of odd.

Another disappointing thing is that after 6 betas, I still find iMessage to be on the slow side. Of course it's still in beta so I'm not being fair here, but I hope Apple can address this before GM or else not many people will use it.

In the mean time, I'm really impressed with Facebook Messenger. It's working pretty well and if all of my friends start using it, then I'll find it hard to go to iMessage even if Apple resolves the bugs with the app by the time it hits GM.
 
When you say whatsapp is instant are you taking into account opening the app up up as well? On my 3GS it can take upto 10 secs sometimes to connect to the network and load (deleting threads can help this but not ideal). I know that it is not entirely WhatsApp's fault but i have to agree with some of the other guys here in that it is far from the best designed app. An integrated solution would be very welcomed from my point of view. From your experience (or anyone elses) does imessage just open up like the iOS4 messages app, ie no 'connecting' waiting etc? If it does then WhatsApp will be significantky slower in comparison

Jon, you are right in the sense that whatsapp does take quite a bit of time to load initially. i do have to sometimes go to settings just to make sure its connected. i have tested imessage just twice with minimal use. it does have a little bit of wait time when creating a text to decide whether the receiver is a iOS user or not. here is a video demonstrating what i mean starting at 30 seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj67J-lOavg

for me, imessage has been a little slower, it seemed to have taken the same time to send a text or imessage, but i have not tested since beta 3.

i hope imessage plays out really well, i live in an edge area, but am always connected to wifi so imessage will be very welcomed!
 
iMessage has a small issue: I cannot choose when a media file is downloaded. When someone sends me a few pictures/video via iMessage and I'm not on a WiFi network, my monthly data usage goes down very fast.

I WhatsApp I see someone had sent me a picture and I can choose to download it when I'm back on a WiFi network.

In iMessage I also cannot choose to resize the image before sending like in Mail.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

I hadn't realised iMessage defaulted to sending via data connection. Can this be changed/customised? As someone pointed out, txts by SMS are usually unlimited. In the UK, data is generally capped at around 1GB or less.

So unless sending MMS or using my phone abroad over wifi, I wouldn't be so happy about using data in preference to SMS.

You can disable iMessage and use only SMS and it may make sense to do so in the UK. That said, in the US, unlimited txt plans can be very expensive. Unlimited txting is an extra $20 per month and txting without a plan costs $.20 for every txt sent AND received.
Even if I somehow exceeded my data limit the overage charge would still be far less then the SMS cost.
 
You can disable iMessage and use only SMS and it may make sense to do so in the UK. That said, in the US, unlimited txt plans can be very expensive. Unlimited txting is an extra $20 per month and txting without a plan costs $.20 for every txt sent AND received.
Even if I somehow exceeded my data limit the overage charge would still be far less then the SMS cost.

For those that don't have unlimited SMS, make sure you turn send as MMS off. iMessage will send as MMS if it can't get a data connection, and sometimes it won't tell you that it did...
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.