Today I would like to rant about SMS, text messaging, or “flinging shit” as it is sometimes known.

I do not text much, maybe I send a couple a day on average? I can appreciate the system though, unlike Samuel L Jackson. Iit’s eminently convenient, messages arrive more or less straight after they are sent, and it can reach a person wherever they are, so long as their phone’s on (which it always is, these days).

What I do not understand, however, is how mobile operators are still able to charge anywhere upwards of 10p (it were 5p when I were a lad, oh aye) for a meagre 160 characters.

Let’s look at this another way: imagine email could only be 160 characters long, and you couldn’t attach files to it. We’re accustomed to not paying for email as it is, so can you imagine being charged 10p a pop for a service so limited? Even if you got 300 a month for free, it would still leave a bitter taste.

And here’s a newsflash: mobile phones have been able to do email for the last four years. Most can even do “push” email in some form or another (as I have noted before), which means a new message arrives mere moments after it was sent.

Now not everybody wants mobile email, since email is boring, full of spam, and generally to do with work. Not to mention to replace SMS would require basically everybody to be using it – the typical critical mass problem.

But wait! SMS can be packet switched too – chances are yor phone is doing this right now (Jack’s is). So that’s your SMS going over a data connection, just email. A data connection which, even at its stingiest, is going to afford you 5MB a month (this is what my cheap-ass O2 contract allowed me a couple of years ago), which is around twenty thousand 160-character text messages. And yet they are still charged for individually, it’s criminal!

Basically SMS is a massive fucking cash cow for network operators right now (as evidenced by the fact that prices have actually risen from five years ago) which they are using to offest the massive collective fuck-up of paying too damn much for 3G spectrum and infrastructure. That said, I am not keen to be milked for their mistakes, are you?

tl;dr version: where is my flat-rate always-on mobile IP connection over which is routed voice, internet, SMS and terrible pronography?

So, I am a big fan of Google’s browser sync plugin for Firefox. Basically, it syncs everything about your browser (history, bookmarks, preferences, autofill data, saved passwords) with Google’s monolithic server-tron located on the mothership in high-earth orbit.

This means that when I log into my account at uni and load up the provided copy of Firefox I have the bookmarks I added last night, the buttons are all where they ought to be, it remembers the password for all my forums and so on. It’s all totally seamless.

Problem is, now I have seen the future and I cannot wait for it to arrive. Why are my calendars and contacts not in some central server and synced-out to various apps?  It has to be apps, mind. Web-based calendars and address books might be fine for you Windows riff-raff, but I’m not about to leave iCal and Address Book. Hell, I am reluctant to leave Safari, since it’s the only browser my iPhone will sync to.

Which brings me to my next point, where is my cross-platform app syncing? Why is there no add-on for syncing Safari to the Google mothership? I can sync Safari to Safari, and Firefox to Firefox, but syncing the two together must happen locally via some cumbersome third application.

I imagine in some distant, far-off future there will exisit a service to which my myriad applications can sync their data as and when changes are made. Contacts, calendars, bookmarks, passwords, photos, songs, all of it lined up neatly in the cloud regardless of the program that created it, and accessible by any program imbued with the required framework. It would make setting up a new computer as easy as entering a password, and seamless backups would be a pleasent side-effect. Furthermore: a bookmark created on my phone would appear without the need for a barabaric cabled synchronisation, similarly that moment wherein you open your phone’s calendar only to find that you never synced your meticulously planned itinerary would be consigned to history.

Of course, Apple already almost has this with .Mac, which can sync data from a variety of applications through OSX’s syncing engine. It’s a closed party though, to which other apps are not invited.

My demands are simple:

1. A single service, I am not using one system for my bookmarks, one for my PIM data and so on
2. Over the air syncing for my iPhone
3. Build it into the applications, no way am I manually running an extra app to keep my shit in check. This needs to be seamless
4. Let everyone play. Keeping my Safaris in sync is all well and good, but maybe I also use a Firefox or two?

So, if someone could get to this please? Maybe someone at Google? An interim solution would be a sync service that plugs into OSX and treats my account on Google’s server like just another device. it doesn’t very well help everybody else though