iPhone Secrets

Chapter 12

iMessage and the Wide World of Push Notifications

In This Chapter

• Understanding iMessage
• Exchanging text messages for iMessages
• Managing multiple accounts on one iPhone
• Maintaining your contacts list
• Sending iMessages to groups
• Keeping notifications under control

A decade from now, I have to wonder: Will the world remember BBM or iMessage? BBM is short for BlackBerry Messenger, and since early 2008, it was the crown jewel of RIM’s software suite. Even today, there are millions of RIM loyalists who refuse to jump ship from BlackBerry, and routinely, I hear “BBM” as one of the primary factors. If you aren’t familiar, BBM is effectively a supercharged SMS system. But rather than simply enabling two people to send short bursts of text to one another, BBM allows for group conversations, picture messages, voice note messages, read receipts, and a wide variety of emoticons. And trust me, the world would be a much :-(‘er place without those. The biggest reason for using BBM, however, just might be its ability to function over any flavor of data—3G, 2G, 4G, Wi-Fi, you name it. The downside? It’s a closed network, and only those with devices that link into the BlackBerry Internet Service can indulge. Three years later, and up pops iMessage. There’s no question that Apple’s following the lead of services before it—BBM most notably—but iMessage has one thing going for it that similar services don’t—hundreds of millions of installed users. This chapter explains how short-burst ...