IM client probably won’t happen soon on an iPhone

I’m willing to be a IM client won’t happen any time soon on an iPhone. The reason? AT&T is charging that nice little extra texting fee for SMS messages. It will be interesting to see how that all plays out – I always thought the extra charges for texting was sort of stupid when you’ve got an “unlimited data” plan – but hey, it’s the carriers trying to suck as much out as they can. It’s worked pretty well for them so far – but I don’t see that its sustainable.

As I sit playing with the phone, listening to some tunes, calling my friends, I’ve got to say its working really well. WiFi isn’t picking up well at my home, but I also have a really old wifi base station (one of the original flying saucer ones from Apple). One thing I noticed is that the phone automatically switches over to Edge when the local WiFi isn’t happening – and it’s pretty smooth. Of course if you’re on a phone call, the Edge data is screwed – you’re SOL. I couldn’t both talk Edge and surf to a web page at the same time. Seems like if Apple made the “phone” component into VOIP, then you could – but the voice quality would likely degrade.

I’m reading updates and notes from all over, seeing what other folks are talking about. Gruber’s crash log from the mail app on the phone is one of the most interesting… kind of a chance to look under the covers as it were.

Activation wasn’t a problem for me, but it’s been horrific for some. Chris has been running with an “iBrick” for something like 10 hours now. Knowing how that kind of software is put together, I’ve got to imagine that there’s some clogged queue in the messaging pipelines somewhere, or someone restarted a service when they were slammed and Chris’ activation has been cooked by some lost messaging or something.