> Apple knew best with iMessage and decides it should invisibly merge sms and their own messaging. Point taken, though I'll point out that iMessage makes it cl

> Apple knew best with iMessage and decides it should invisibly merge sms and their own messaging. Point taken, though I'll point out that iMessage makes it clear the distinction between iMessages (blue) and SMS (green), and provides an easy 'send as SMS' option. Google's message integration, on the other hand, merged SMS and GTalk, with the result that I have several friends who would try to text someone to say 'hey where are you at', and it would send them a GTalk message to their laptop, which was turned on and signed in at home, rather than an SMS to their phone. Worse, I know one friend who couldn't figure out if there was any way to tell which one it sent, or how to force it to do one or the other. In other words, Google did the same thing, but even worse. > Result? A dozen times a day it would hang for 10 minutes or so trying to connect to data-unreachable imessage servers. Just send a damn SMS, which is what I wanted in the first place. I haven't had this specific issue frequently, except when I had extremely unreliable data services (i.e. if I had a data connection but my network was broken, if I was on Wifi but my internet connection was down, or if I was in San Francisco), but I understand that there are definitely people who experience one of those issues very frequently.