[Macworld]

Post your comments for Pinger rolls out iPad-optimized version of TextFree here

[bear90039]

This iss one of the apps that phones home? I'm sure it is. In exchange for free texting they get a transcript of every text you send and receive. I read about it, and saw the list of apps that do this on MacWorld or ARS last year. I dumped it from my phone immediately.
Don't go for that free crap. It's marketing and wire-tapping al rolled up in a free app.

[JMHammer]

I can't speak to the privacy issues that Bear brought up. Maybe it's true; maybe not. But no one should be shocked that Pinger is in business to, you know, make money.

I can speak to the app and service, which I've been using for texting for about a year and for voice since the beta (September 2010, I think). TextFree isn't pretty, and isn't as full-functioned as the iPhone's built-in Messaging app (can't send media except pictures and only one picture at a time, can only send to 5 destinations at once, doesn't integrate with other apps for sending data, etc.) but for basic texting (with pictures), which is all I need, it gets the job done. And the VOIP is very high quality, and - very important for me - integrates perfectly with Google Voice.

For $6/year to remove ads (or nothing if you aren't bothered by the little banner ad taking up some of your tiny screen's real estate and eating a tiny bit of your carrier's 3G data ration) it's a deal compared to AT&T's $5-$20/month (that's $60-$240/year) for MMS. And it's trivial to earn calling time for VOIP by downloading free sponsored apps from the TextFree reward program: I haven't paid for a single minute of talk time, and currently have about 2400 minutes in my call bank. Besides, only outgoing calls use minutes from the call bank; incoming calls are all completely free. This makes TextFree with Voice a nearly perfect "forwarding phone" for Google Voice.

The only issue I've experienced is TextFree "servers down" which is due to the popularity of the service with kiddies. It seems to happen about 20-30 minutes at a time, usually late in the afternoon or evening - when the kiddies are flooding the service with texts after school. These "servers down" events don't affect voice calling, and have been less and less frequent as Year 2011 has progressed.

All in all, I think that TextFree with Voice is one of the highest-quality "free" texting and VOIP services available, and probably the best overall value for features/quality/cost.

I don't buy their reasons for releasing an iPad-specific version of their TextFree Unlimited client. An iPad handles TextFree with Voice, for both texting and VOIP, just fine and it would have been nice to have that app available in a "universal" version which would take better advantage of the additional screen real estate on an iPad compared to an iPhone or iPod Touch. I think it has more to do with them releasing yet another distinct app for which a user has to buy out ads if the user doesn't want ads - again, I don't think the ads are a big deal if you don't want to buy them out, nor do I think it's some shocking development that a company wants to make money. But releasing multiple apps to try to get multiple buys of the same thing (in this case, the no-ads annual subscription) does seem to me to be a bit low. I'm maybe a bit more miffed about this than I would be had Pinger's Twitter rep not responded to my question about this with a flippant "No particular reason," and a stupid ascii smiley face.