Personal Side of iMessages for Android

I purposefully kept my late entry, Apple should bring iMessage to Android, on a general level, without bringing my personal specifics into it.

I’m one of those guys who enjoys tracking things. I do this for fun and to answer the questions that’d just pop up in my head if I didn’t. I track my ORCA Card usage, my telecom bills, and just my general spending. (Unlike I a crazy AOL customer, and many other customers I don’t suffer from decision fatigue in that way, quite the opposite, it’ll bug me if I don’t track this stuff.)

I have a spreadsheet summarizing every month I’ve been with AT&T which calculates exactly what I spent, and what my expenses would be on some other choices. (For simplicity I leave out the discounts I receive after the line items.)

This has served me well. For instance when AT&T started offering 2GB of data for $25 a month, I jumped for it, instead of sticking with my grandfathered plan of unlimited data for $30 a month. Since June 2010 this has saved me $115. Not exactly huge, but not exactly pocket change. My data usage has continued to go up. In the six months before I switched in June 2010 my average monthly data usage was 453 megabytes per month, in the past six months it roughly doubled to 834 megabytes per month, still less than half of my cap, and I use whatever data I want and can manage to grab.

My SMS/MMS usage dramatically dropped for my bills ending in March and April to an average of 120 messages per month. (Why this doesn’t clearly correlate with the release of iOS 5 I don’t know, thats a question that I need to do more analysis to answer.) For various reasons too arcane to get into here, I’m on the $20 unlimited SMS plan, which means for March and April I’m just twenty or so messages shy from hitting break even on a metered billing plan, and after that its all savings.

So being an analysis addict, I pulled the detailed SMS level data and found out that if I converted my top two texting recipients easily accounted for over twenty messages a month, but I also knew that they weren’t going to be hopping onto an iPhone. After much searching I’ve moved them over to TextFree from Pinger, but its a wee bit of a pain. So it’d be excellent if this problem took care of itself by those Android phone users getting onto iMessages.. Thats the thought at least..