Monday, May 12, 2014

It's annoying that you can't send text messages through WiFi

This won't be a problem for much longer, because it's getting harder and harder to differentiate between cell phones and computers.  If I can send/receive email on my phone, and set it up to give the same notifications that I do with a text, how is it actually any different?  But that's not the norm yet, so for the time being this really bugs me:

Probably 90% of what I use my phone for is internet related, and it all functions through either my cell signal or WiFi.  Most places I go have a cell signal, so everything works fine.  When I'm at home I have WiFi, and that works fine too.  But I don't get a very good cell signal in my apartment, and sometimes I miss calls and can't send texts because that part of the phone doesn't work through WiFi.  It seems ridiculous that I can video chat through google, but am unable to send a text or make a regular phone call.  Why can't cell signals just broadcast through WiFi also?

Eventually the internet will be everywhere, and cell phone service will become obsolete.


2 comments:

  1. Its different technology. SMS/MMS (texts) goes through different channels (satellite radios) than WiFi, which just uses the internet.

    These days I barely use text messaging, as I use Google Hangouts or Facebook to chat with most of my friends over the internet, whether over a 4G or WiFi connection.

    Carriers also stand to benefit from SMS/MMS because they can obviously charge for that, while they have no control over messaging over the internet. Overall though traditional texting is trending downwards as more and more services pop up such as the ones I mentioned above as well as iMessage obviously. The new snapchat update also brings the first cross platform chat service to an app with an already huge user base.

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    Replies
    1. Yup, Mike, you're dead on. I could actually do without the phone part of my phone completely, and only use google messages and hangouts, if that's what everybody else did to (that's the future eventually). But for the time being I still need regular texts because that's the only thing that everybody has, and has notifications set up for. Even my mom with a flip phone it beeps when gets a text... How does snapchat work?

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