Mrs deadly has iMessage set up on her iPad (which is at home with me). She’s at work in an area of poor signal (GPRS fine, but no 3G…Vodafone…fancy that eh?). Her iPad is on wifi here as is my phone. So if I send her a message, and it goes as an iMessage, it bleeps up on her iPad – does this mean that if she has no 3G at work, she’s not getting these messages on her phone as as far as my phone is concerned, it’s been delivered as an iMessage and the iPad has received it.

Which leads me to the other thing what confuses me about iMessage…if I send a message and I’m in 3G/wifi, it goes as an iMessage – what decides how it’s delivered to the other phone? (I get that iMessage only goes between iDevices.)

Sorry, slightly dense questions…

The iMessage goes everywhere the Apple account is logged in, so phone and iPad probably. If she has no signal she’ll obviously not get it straight away. What I don’t know is if she’ll get a wifi version on her iPad and an SMS on her iPhone.

Normally if you send an iMessage to an iPhone and it only has phone signal it goes as an SMS. That’s my understanding anyway

iMessage is very odd sometimes, and sending pictures especially can cost if they go over the 3G (ha!) network.

It’s not a great system if you’re trying to send a message, but you want it to go over 3G (e.g. my wife has a basic brick phone, so it’s text only) – you can hold down on the sending balloon icon, and it will offer option to “send as text message” (not sure if that then defaults or is reversible).

is that what you mean?

In the settings you can turn on/off the send as SMS if the iMessage service is unavailable

I find iMessage a bit unreliable, sometimes it works perfectly and other times messages / photos just go missing and never appear.

what if 3G/iMessage service is unavailable at the recipient end though?

She’ll receive it on both devices but if it’s read one device it’ll marked as read on the other. With GPRS is may if she’s very lucky download.

what if 3G/iMessage service is unavailable at the recipient end though?

When it becomes available it’ll sync messages.

what if 3G/iMessage service is unavailable at the recipient end though?

It offers the option to resend as an SMS / MMS.

When it become available it’ll sync messages.

That is the theory, my experience would suggest the messages just vanish…..

That is the theory, my experience would suggest the messages just vanish…..

Not had that issue myself.

I gues the trick is to get her to turn her ipad’s wifi off when she’s not using it

Not had that issue myself.

thats because ‘they’ are not watching you. Yet. ‘They’ are watching footflaps – hence the bunker.