Back when all the speculation was happening about the ipod-texting situation, I thought the train of thought seemed extraneous. I thought I was pretty tech savvy, but this morning I asked my own 13 year old daughter to clarify a few things, and I wanted to share this info.
Advantages of texting through an ipod:
1. QWERTY keyboard. Prior to getting her smartphone, DD had a flip phone with the older style of texting (tapping '5' three times to yield the letter "L") The QWERTY keyboard made communicating WAY less tedious.
2. Multi-tasking. Games, internet, youtube, etc, in between texting.
Disadvantages:
1. Wifi-dependent (already heavily discussed on here) which means no texting in the car or on the go... but there are still apps that live on the the ipod that can be accessed without wifi. To clarify, the ipod is not completely useless without wifi.
2. Charging was SUPER inconvenient. This was a doozy in our house, because when the kids' docking stations weren't working properly, they'd jam up our computer ports running the usb-to-ipod cords. They also discovered they could charge them via the ports in the wii and in the blu ray player.
3. This was the revelation for me-- the texting via ipod app had to be separate from your mobile phone number (which we've talked about a bit on here) but when the app assigns a new phone number to you, it causes some confusion, at least at first. The numbers appear to be assigned at random, so even though we live in TX our then-eleven-year-old was now texting us from a New Jersey area code. Pretty disconcerting!
The other thing is, since the message is arriving from a different number, none of the recipients recognizes the user at first, so the user has to identify himself or herself at the start of the message-- an extra step, often requiring an extra explanation, too, before they can even get the conversation started.
