Archive for category Cell Phone
How much texting is too much?
Posted by Ben in Cell Phone on December 26, 2009
If your hands, specifically your thumbs, experience daily pains and sores, it might be time to put away the keyboard and pick up the phone.
Texting; the form of communication through words on mobile devices. Why do we text? Its not at all faster than making a phone call, and unless your a teenager, you probably haven’t mastered your phone’s mobile keyboard yet. The CTIA’s latest figures state that American’s with cell phone sent a over 740 billion text messages in just the first half of 2009. Do the math; that 4.1 billion texts daily, about 17 texts per person with a phone.
With more texts, fewer users were actually making phone calls, dropping the average call time from 3.13 minutes in 2007 to 2.03 minutes in 2009. Don’t get us wrong though, more and more minutes are being added to calling plans, and normal phone calls still take place on a daily basis. And with all those extra texting and voice plans, your bill on rose 2% this year to a$49.57 a month… and we don’t think most people have data plans at that price!
So how much is too much? Well if we consider that some don’t text, we can’t make our number too high. And with one 14 year old Florida girl sending over 35,463 text messages in a month (1,182 per day), we can’t make it too high either. Wireless companies usually charge around $10-$15 for about 200 text messages, about 7 texts a day. But for approximately $20-$25, you can get anywhere from 1000 to unlimited from your provider. At 1000 a month, you’d be sending 33 a day, just a little too much for those who would rather call. So what’s the magic number? We’d say 500 texts per month, about 17 per day. Any less and I’d congratulate you for actually using your phone for its intentions, but anymore… and I might not ever give you my number.
App Spotlight: chompSMS for Android
Posted by Ben in Cell Phone, Software on October 23, 2009
The chompSMS app is no real application, but an enhancement to your current SMS app.
App Name: chompSMS
Platform: Android
Price: Free (with carrier texting)
Overall rating: 4/5
An application that iPhone owners could only dream of, chompSMS is available exclusively on the Android OS and supercharges the SMS available on your phone. chompSMS can be used as a replacement to the built-in SMS application, or you can just use it to boost the features of your current application. The application even offers there own message network called the “chompSMS” network. To use their texting service instead of your carriers, you’ll pay a flat rate of $0.12 per text.
They try and tell you this is “much cheaper” then using your carrier, but doing the math, sending 200 texts through there network would run you around $24. Pay an extra $6 and you could probably get unlimited from your own carrier. On the other hand, this is quite a deal for international text messaging, if you do that a lot, but be sure if you do text your pals over seas that your not jacking up their bill.
The application itself enhances the messaging experience nonetheless with a slew of features including: quick compose, chat style bubbles (like on the iPhone), quick reply option, various user interface customizations, notification customizations, ring tones per contact, and blacklisting. For a free application, it really fixes the holes left from the default app.
The Bottom Line: Its an excellent download that really enhances the way you text people on your phone. The app itself is free and is well worth downloading, but the rates for using their personal network are a bit outrageous. Runs fairly smoothly most of the time but can have a little lag every now and again, but not enough to keep you from using such a great app.