Earlier this week Apple announced the arrival of their new OSX build called Mountain Lion. One of their heralded new features was the introduction of iMessage to the desktop platform with the idea being simple: 1 conversation continued across any of Apple's hardware be it iPod touch, iPad, or iPhone, with iMessage you will never stop the conversation.
I myself downloaded the beta of iMessage and tested this out first hand, I had my iPad, iPhone, and MacBook Pro in front of me as I carried on in conversation with my friend in iMessage, as each message he wrote came in I saw simultaneous notifications on all 3 platforms and it got me thinking.
How far are we away from this being our true mobile lifestyle??
Who says we can't have a call/sms/mms across all of our hardware platforms? Why stop at just messaging? The HP TouchPad was a flop in many regards as was the Blackberry playbook but they both carried along bridging technologies that allowed a text or call to be addressed on their tablet counterparts when paired to the appropriate phone.
Is iMessage the first step of you getting a call on your iPhone but also being able to answer from your iPad, iPod, or MacBook??
This not-so-subtle inclusion of iMessage in Mountain Lion has the possibilities of the next step of synergy looking like the sky is indeed the limit.
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Did iMessage usher in the beginning of true synergy??
IMO, iMessage really didn't bring in the beginning of "true synergy" since it already exists with Google Voice (as pointed out by my question here: gdgt.com/question/why-is-imessage-on-the-desktop-s...). With Google Voice, not only can you check your texts from your iOS or OS X devices, you can check them from any device with a web browser whether it's from a dumbphone's WAP browser or on Safari on a Mac.
I was in the middle of nowhere one day with no data signal (for my phone) and no wifi and I had to text someone really urgently. Instead not being able to send a message from my phone or laptop, I used my Kindle 3G's (which had 1 bar of EDGE) web browser and used Google Voice from there. When you don't have to rely on any single platform or device to communicate or access your data, that's true synergy.
I was in the middle of nowhere one day with no data signal (for my phone) and no wifi and I had to text someone really urgently. Instead not being able to send a message from my phone or laptop, I used my Kindle 3G's (which had 1 bar of EDGE) web browser and used Google Voice from there. When you don't have to rely on any single platform or device to communicate or access your data, that's true synergy.
iMessage is one step in creating that "synergy." The addition of "Reminders" and "Notes" are additional steps. Then being able to utilize iCloud and have documents available across any iOS or OS X device are yet additional steps. This functionality does exist in a piecemeal way through services such as Dropbox, Google Voice, etc. But having all this functionality already integrated into the OS is going to be a major step in the right direction.
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