Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

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I'm 45. I prefer sms texts or emails to voicemail. I prefer sms texts or email to actuL voice calls too - it's just easier to share information. Of course sometimes phone calls are for just chatting and voicemails fail for that too.

Currently iMessages are causing considerable problems with silent fails and no option to send as SMS (which they used to have - not sure why that changed). All the other messaging solutions have some fairly big flaws too.

Also: i really really fucking hate the way I'll get a notification with a partial message, and then have to open the app to read the message. Opening the app to read the message has a delay of maybe a minute before the message downloads - why? Why can they show me a preview in a notification and then take an age to give me that same text in their app? This is particularly bad with Facebook's messenger app (so bad I'm tempted to delete the app and leave different contact details on FB) but als happens on Whatsapp and others.

The "send as SMS option is now hidden. If message you sent does not say "Delivered" under it, you can press and hold your message. There will be a "Sens as SMS" option in the context menu.

No, this does not work. I get [copy][more]. Selecting more just leads to a select & delete dialog, with no ability to send as SMS. This is to a contact where I had previously sent messages as SMS before.

I also prefer SMS and email, for most conversations. I'm just surprised so many state that they would rather force someone else to send an SMS or email because they hate voicemail so much.

No one is being forced to send a message. If it feels like a big burden to type up 140 chars or a few lines of an email to send a message, maybe that message isn't important enough to bother someone with. (talking internal business here, not personal or external)

The reason I dislike voicemail for internal business - not sales, support, biz dev or personal calls - is because it often implies that a call wasn't planned, which means that someone wants you to make decisions on the fly or they think that your time can be interrupted whenever they feel like it. Of course there are a thousand exceptions to this - but I prefer other means of communication for internal business interactions.

So, if I'm calling you while driving, you would rather I have to pull off to the side of the road, or risk and accident to leave you a message?

Your dislike of voicemail makes no sense... Are you saying you want to get rid of phones altogether? Because that's what it sounds like.. voicemail is a fallback from a phone call.

On an iOS device, enable Settings>Messages>"Send as SMS" to have it automatically fall over to SMS when iMessage isn't sending properly.

text is good for one-way information sending, but I've found that when you need to actually discuss something, a 3 minute phone call can replace a 15 e-mail exchange.

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