160by2.com Launches Free SMS App for iPhone

Popular free SMS website 160by2.com has launched its very own iPhone app. Their website allowed people to send SMSs from their website via the computer or the mobile phone (via a mobile-optimized site). The app will allow direct access to sending free SMSs across borders, and within too. Another advantage of using the app over the mobile site is that you can select contacts from the ones stored in the phone directly. It works only in a few countries at the moment; namely U.S., UK, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. All these countries can send SMSs free to cell-phones in India.

iPhone users in India can also send free SMSs to anybody in India. The funny thing is that it isn't clear whether Indian users can send free texts to other countries. This service is ad-based, so 80 characters from the typical 160 in a single SMS are available for you to type. The rest 80 are given to advertisers to append contextual ads afterwards. The International SMS facility sounds lucrative to people residing abroad and wanting to communicate with the people of India. But with local SMSs, most post-paid operators these days have lucrative plans that have a couple of hundred SMSs free. Some even have an absurd 15,000 SMS per month limit. So, I really wonder if many people will be keen on using this app on a day-to-day basis for sending local SMSs.

The service does have its share of cons; other than the ads after every message you send, the message sender name is 160by2.com. So, the receiver cannot quickly hit reply - one would have to create a new message. So, do you think this app is worth keeping in your iPhone? Download it from here and let us know.