"Texting," as the young whippersnappers call it, was huge in Asia and Europe before it began catching on in the United States. These days, however, it's increasingly popular, especially among teenagers and twentysomethings.
SMS stands for Short Messaging Service. An SMS text message is a very short note (under 160 characters—a sentence or two) that you shoot from one cellphone to another. What's so great about it?
Like a phone call, it's immediate. You get the message off your chest right now.
As with email, the recipient doesn't have to answer immediately. The message waits for him even when his phone is turned off.
Unlike a phone call, it's nondisruptive. You can send someone a text message without worrying that he's in a movie, a meeting, or anywhere else where talking and holding a phone up to the head would be frowned upon. (And the other person can answer nondisruptively, too, by sending a text message back.)
You have a written record of the exchange. There's no mistaking what the person meant. (Well, at least not because of sound quality. Whether or not you can understand the texting shorthand culture that's evolved from people using no-keyboard cellphones to type English words—"C U 2morrO," and so on—is another matter entirely.)
The original iPhone service plan came with 200 free text messages a month; the base iPhone 3G and 3GS plans don't come with any. You can pay $5 a month for those 200 messages, or pay more for more. Remember that you use up one of those 200 each time you send or receive a message.
The same rules and pricing apply to picture and video messages (known as MMS, or multimedia messaging service), which AT&T finally launched for the iPhone in the late summer of 2009.
When you get an SMS, the iPhone plays a quick marimba riff and displays the name or number of the sender and the message, in a translucent message rectangle. If you're using the iPhone at the time, you can tap Ignore (to keep doing what you were doing) or View (to open the message).
Otherwise, if the iPhone was asleep, it wakes up and displays the message right on its Unlock screen. You have to unlock the phone and then open the Messages program manually. Tap the very first icon in the upper-left corner of the Home screen.
Tip
The Text icon on the Home screen bears a little circled number "badge," letting you know how many new text messages are waiting for you.
Either way, the look of Messages (which was called Text before the iPhone 3.0 software) might surprise you. It resembles iChat, Apple's chat program for Mac, in which incoming text messages and your replies are displayed as though they're cartoon speech balloons.
Tip
The last 50 exchanges appear here. If you want to see even older ones, scroll to the very top and tap Load Earlier Messages.
To respond to the message, tap in the text box at the bottom of the screen. The iPhone keyboard appears. Type away, and then tap Send. Assuming your phone has cellular coverage, the message gets sent off immediately.
And if your buddy replies, then the balloon-chat continues, scrolling up the screen. Don't forget to turn the iPhone 90 degrees for a bigger, wider keyboard!
What's cool is that the iPhone retains all these exchanges. You can review them or resume them at any time by tapping Messages on the Home screen. A list of text message conversations appears; a blue dot indicates conversations that contain new messages.
Tip
If you've sent a message to a certain group of people, you can pre-address a new note to the same group by tapping the old message's row here.
The truth is, these listings represent people, not conversations. For example, if you had a text message exchange with Chris last week, a quick way to send a new text message (on a totally different subject) to Chris is to open that "conversation" and simply send a "reply." The iPhone saves you the administrative work of creating a new message, choosing a recipient, and so on.
If having these old exchanges hanging around presents a security (or marital) risk, you can delete one in either of two ways:
From the Text Messages list: Swipe away the conversation. Just swipe your finger horizontally across the conversation's name (either direction). That makes the Delete confirmation button appear immediately.
From within a conversation's speech-balloons screen: Tap Edit to open the message-deletion screen. Here you can delete all the exchanges simultaneously (tap Clear All) or vaporize only particularly incriminating messages. To do that, tap the round
buttons for the individual balloons you want to nuke; then tap
Delete (2) (or whatever number the button says). Tap Done.
If you want to text somebody you've texted before, the quickest way, as noted above, is simply to resume one of the "conversations" already listed in the Text Messages list.
But options to fire off a text message are lurking all over the iPhone. A few examples:
In the Messages program. From the Home screen, tap Messages. The iPhone opens the complete list of messages you've received. Tap the
button at the top-right corner of the screen to open a new text
message window, with the keyboard ready to go.Address it by typing a few letters of the recipient's name and then choosing from the list of matches. Or tap the
button, which opens your Contacts list. Tap the person you want
to text.In the Contacts, Recents, or Favorites lists. Tap a person's name in Contacts, or
next to a listing in Recents or Favorites, to open the Info
screen; tap Text Message. In other words, sending a text message to anyone whose cellphone number lives in your
iPhone is only two taps away.From Photos or Voice Memos. Whenever you see a
(Share) button—when you're looking at a photo or a video in
Photos, for example, or when you tap the 
button in Voice Memos—the usual list of sending options appears. It usually includes Email, MobileMe—and
MMS. Tapping MMS sends you back to Messages, where the photo, video, or audio file is ready to send. (More
on multimedia messages shortly.)
You can now tap that button again to add another recipient for this
same message (or tap the 
button to type in a phone number). Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary; they'll all get the same
message.
In any case, the skinny little text message composition screen is waiting for you now. You're ready to type and send!
Man, we waited long enough for this. It was absolutely bizarre that, for all its other superpowers, the iPhone could not send photos to other cellphones, let alone audio clips or video clips. This feature—called MMS (multimedia messaging service) was on every cellphone on earth, even the $20 starter phones. But not on the iPhone.
The iPhone 3.0 software finally brought this ability to the iPhone 3G and 3GS. (Sadly, the original iPhone shall remain MMS-less.) It took AT&T a few months to catch up and turn on the feature ("by the end of the summer 2009," they kept saying), but it was worth the wait.
To send a photo or (on the iPhone 3GS) a video, tap the 
icon next to the box where you type your text messages (shown on the facing page at right). Two buttons appear: Take
Photo or Choose Existing. (On the iPhone 3GS, the first button says Take Photo or Video
instead.)
If you want to transmit a photo or video that's already on your phone, then tap Choose Existing; your Photos app opens automatically, showing all your photos and videos. Tap the one you want and then tap Choose. If you choose Take Photo or Video instead, then your Camera app opens so you can take a new picture or (on the iPhone 3GS) snag a video clip.
In any case, you now return to your SMS conversation in progress—but now that photo or video appears inside the Send box. Type a caption or comment, if you like. Then tap Send to fire it off to your buddy.
In general, text messages are fleeting; most people have no idea how they might capture them and save them forever. Copy and Paste helps with that. (So does the amazing Google Voice service, but that's another conversation.)
Some of the stuff in those text messages is easy to capture,
though. For example, if you're on the receiving end of an MMS photo or video, tap the
small preview in the speech bubble. It opens at full-screen size so you can have a
better look at it—and if it's a video, there's even a ► button so you can play it.
Either way, if the picture or video is good enough to preserve, tap the button. You're offered a Save Image button; tap it to add it to
your iPhone's collection. (If you have a 3GS, you can also save a video—but tap Save
Video, of course.)
If someone sends you contact information (name and address, for example), you can add it to your Address Book. Just tap inside that bubble, and then tap either Create New Contact or Add to Existing Contact.
Text messaging is awesome. Paying for text messaging, not so much.
Fortunately, there are all kinds of sneaky ways to do text messaging for free. Yes, you read that right: free. Here are a couple of examples:
Solution #1: FreeMMS. It's an app, of course. A $1 program from the App Store (Chapter 12) that really, truly works. It lets you send unlimited text messages—no, even better, picture messages—for free.
There are only two small gotchas. First, you have to specify the callee's cellphone company (Verizon, AT&T, or whatever), which you don't always know. Second, replies come to your iPhone as email messages, so you're deprived of that nice chat-room/balloon conversational effect. But come on, man—you're saving 20 cents per message forever!
Solution #2: Use the AIM chat program described in the next section. Create a buddy whose address is, for example, +12125561212 (your friend's cellphone number). Any message you send to that address arrives as a text message—free to you. (This technique has a key advantage: Your buddy can actually reply.)
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