A great iPhone application called BeeJiveIM allows iPhone users to send SMS text messages to anyone they want absolutely free!
This app is basically a glorified version of the free AIM app. It is an instant messaging program at heart that allows you to send and receive text messages using an AIM account. The true beauty of BeeJiveIM lies in it ability to provide users with push notification, allowing your friends to send you messages even if you don’t have the app open. BeeJiveIM will save their message, send you an email notifying you that you have a new message waiting and display that message the next time you open BeeJiveIM. With other apps like AIM, when you close the app, you are logged off and can no longer receive messages essentially the defeating the whole purpose. The best part of all of this, is that you aren’t using any text messages!
It’s probably best to just get your hands dirty, dive in, and start playing with the app to figure out all of its great functionality, but in a nutshell, you send your friends texts in BeeJiveIM instead of the iPhone’s native SMS interface, and you receive their replies in the BeeJiveIM app, not the native SMS interface, therefore costing you NOTHING as you use NO text messages.
This might help you understand how great this is too. Here is my set up.
- I created a new free account with AIM and I just made my screename my name.
- I bought the BeeJiveIM app for $15.99 from the app store.
- I added my new AIM account into BeeJiveIM (note, you can also use Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, MySpace, Facebook and Yahoo! to IM people from your phone, but this is about free sms text messaging so you can play with those on your own).
- You can also add this AIM account to your computer to make it easier to add your friend’s phone number, so do that.
- This is the worst part, go through your contacts on your phone and add the people you text most often to your buddy list for this account. You add their number by typing out +15555555 (yes you have to include the +1 before the area code and number, and no, no spaces or dashes of any kind) as their screename. You can then give that “phone number/screename” an alias, or in other words, the name of the person whose number it is. Note that this can all be done on your phone in BeeJiveIM, but I found it much faster to do it on my computer in my IM client (adium or ichat, etc). So now, you have a buddy list comprised of “buddies” that are really just your friend’s phone numbers.
- Open BeeJiveIM to see your buddy list. Tap on their name to send a message. They will receive a text message on their phone from your AIM name. They can then reply to your message and you will receive it in your BeeJiveIM app. And that my friends, is a beautiful, wonderful, and Oh-So-Free solution for free texting!
So why else is this so amazing? Well, I’m glad you asked.
- In each buddies ‘Buddy Info’ section (tap on the blue arrow next to their name), you can link their number to a contact in your phone’s address book. When you do that, BeeJiveIM actually gathers all the data you have saved in your phone about that contact and imports it into their buddy info, including pictures!
- It is fully customizable allowing for different backgrounds, text bubble colors, list layouts, etc.
- It allows for landscape keyboard mode.
- And, since it is an AIM account, you can have this buddy list on your computer also, so you can actually text your friends through your computer using our IM client! When they reply via text, you will receive an IM on your computer!
I could go on and on but clearly I love this app and this solution to my SMS text messaging dilemma. I was very wary to try it out, but it was definitely worth it.
One other thing to note is that I do pay for the basic texting plan of $5 per month for 200 texts. I do this only because your friends will inevitably text you to your phone number. There a number of other scenarios where I find it best to keep this basic texting plan so I don’t have to constantly worry about people sending me text messages that I will have to pay for. So far, it is working out perfectly for me.
