What does this mean to you? Well, if you often send SMS messages to people with an iPhone or BlackBerry (and many other phones), this means that you can send messages via AIM in real time using your data plan instead of using your alloted SMS messages.

Additionally, AIM for iPhone allows you to send SMS messages for free to any of your iPhone contacts with mobile numbers via your AIM account. So not only can you communicate on the AIM network using your data plan, you can also communicate using SMS via AIM using your data plan. This seems to me like a great way to avoid spending money on an extra SMS plan.

What makes this extra special nice is that you can also communicate in real time with your AIM buddies using their computers as well. Can this get any better?

There are two versions of the AIM app on the iTunes Store: a free version supported by ads and a $2.99 version with no ads and landscape keyboard capabilities. For some, $2.99 is a small price to pay for a landscape keyboard.

Happy messaging!

Okay, I have to admit that I do not own an iPhone so my opinion may be a little off here, but why is there such a fuss over being able to develop for the iPhone? As a techno super freak, I keep up with a lot of technology sites and blogs through my favorite feed reader, Google Reader. It seems like there has been at least one post a day about something to do with hacking the iPhone so you can run native third party applications. At this point, I have to admit that these posts have me a bit bored and annoyed.

If Apple had intended the iPhone to be an open development environment, they would have kept it open and made it possible and incredibly easy to develop applications using Xcode. Third party applications are good for business so Apple must have had a very important reason for not allowing native development.

Instead of wasting all of this time and effort on hacking the iPhone, all of these obviously talented and dedicated developers should be focusing their efforts on developing the best web applications possible to work with the iPhone. There are some great examples of iPhone-optimized sites out there like Facebook, Digg, OneTrip, and Meebo. I know that a connection to the web is required to run these applications, but with Wi-Fi and the cellular network, how often are iPhone users really without an active connection? The web now provides a very powerful development environment, and it really is time to focus on creating the best iPhone web applications the world has ever seen. Focus guys, focus.

ThinkSecret reported today that Apple has once again hooked up with Cingular to help them launch the iPhone. While this is great for me and millions of other Cingular customers, my hope is that Apple doesn’t tie themselves down to one service provider for too long. There are just too many potential Apple customers that use the other major cellular providers to ignore them for long, and I don’t really see people switching providers just to get a new fancy phone. It costs too much in fees and penalties to do that.

Of course, because it’s an Apple product, maybe it will be sweet and cool enough to cause a revolution in cellular phones just as the iPod has changed the digital music market for the better.