Second, considering all your “chat” messages are actually SMS messages, they count against your monthly SMS quota. It can be useful as a way for someone using iChat/AIM on his or her computer to send you a quick info, but whether the letter isn’t urgent, there’s not much of an advantage by good ol’ newsletter — which is free. First, it’s no longer instant messaging. When you reply to one of these messages, your reply is additionally sent via SMS; AOL’s system converts it to a standard AIM letter and thereupon forwards it to the recipient.

The arrangement works reasonably well, but there are some significant drawbacks. Fine whether you use the feature only occasionally, but expensive whether you chat frequently and haven’t upgraded your SMS plan.

Another drawback is that you don’t have access to your iChat/AIM buddy list from your phone, so it’s more difficult to initiate a “chat.” (In fact, you may not be able to initiate a chat at all; that feature is limited to specific carriers and phones, and I haven’t been able to get it to work on my iPhone.) Finally, messages you receive via Mobile AIM won’t come directly from your buddies; rather, they’ll seem to come from various AIM/SMS gateway numbers, such as 265-080, with

your buddy’s name included in the body of the notice. whether you’ve ever used SMS before, you know it takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes for your recipient to get your report. Here at the Macworld offices, several of us use Mobile AIM to invent ourselves available for urgent messages when away from our computers, but anything non-urgent goes through mail.

that means that in the iPhone’s Text app, each Mobile AIM chat will seem in a different conversation entry, each labeled with one of these gateway numbers.

For these reasons, Mobile AIM isn’t much of a replacement for iChat.

Reader Keith has asked us to weigh in on AOL’s Mobile AOL Instant Messaging (Mobile AIM) service as an alternative to “real” iChat on the iPhone.

The way Mobile AIM works is that after signing up for a Mobile AIM history (or registering your current iChat/AIM account), you can have any iChat/AIM messages sent to that detail forwarded to your iPhone as SMS messages; humans can additionally report your phone directly by sending a letter, via iChat, to +xxxyyyzzzz (+ followed by your phone number). So you’re no longer chatting in real date.

Original post by Dan Frakes

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