by Gary Fung
Price: $0.99 / Free
Why you should:
Chances are, you bought yourself a mobile phone to be contactable at all times. Or if you're an elderly person or child, someone got one for you in case of emergencies. Elderly people and children can leave now; you're not paying your own bills. You can text ur bffs all through class or physiotherapy, vote for American Idol, Canadian Idol, Australian Idol, and any other international contest you happen to see while on YouTube – it doesn't matter, someone else has got your back.
But real people with real money trouble know how much texting costs. On some networks, you even have to pay to receive a text. Yet, if you're on a reasonably generous data plan, you could send hundreds of thousands of emails and hardly break five bucks. Plus, SMSes cost your carrier virtually nothing to deliver! These days, sending a text is the telephonic equivalent of drinking bottled spring water, using gourmet sea salt at the table, and having your orange juice squeezed by the thighs of Swiss virgins.
Ping! tries to offer an alternative to texting. Your friends must also have the app, but a free version (with advanced functionality removed) is now finally available. Once installed, you can trade messages all day for absolutely nothing. The app uses Apple's Push Notifications technology to pop an alert up on your screen no matter what you're doing. Ping! doesn't need to be left running at all. Sounds sweet, but...
Why you shouldn't:
Ping! requires your friends to 1) own iPhones, and 2) trust and love you enough to install an app that no one else they know uses. We can handle #1, but er... let's not push our luck with #2.
Push email. Google Talk. MSN Messenger. Yahoo Messenger. AIM. ICQ. Jabber. Facebook Chat. There's no shortage of messaging networks, and they all communicate with your friends' PCs, Macs, and enabled mobile phones. Why can't everyone just use push email?
Buying into a random proprietary app like Ping! by a random independent developer whose company name in iTunes is Gary Fung is kind of like getting a pacemaker made by your uncle Benedict who's a pretty smart guy, except he also likes to make his own special batteries that need to be replaced every now and then, but oh wait uncle Benedict died last spring and what's that beeping sound in your chest? Oh shit indeed.
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Positives: Free version available, but even at 99c, much cheaper than texting in the long run (if you have friends using it)
Unpositives: Made by some guy who might turn his servers off one day without warning, rendering it useless. Somewhat buggy, truncates messages past an unknown character count (!). Less secure and reliable than push email.
Rating: 3 / 5
Buy Ping! in the iTunes App Store.
Get Ping! Lite for free in the iTunes App Store.
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