Pinger’s Textfree Is Massive, Now Over 3.5 Billion Messages Sent

It’s a promise sounds too good to be true: free, unlimited texting to and from your iPhone. And even if a service did manage to offer it, it certainly couldn’t be sustainable, could it? Pinger, a startup that launchedback in 2006 as a voicemail service but has since pivoted in a big way, would beg to differ: the company has managed to become immensely popular on the iPhone by offering free text messages to users through an application called Textfree. And it’s just blown past another major milestone: users have sent 3.5 billion text messages using Textfree since it launched in March 2009.

So how do the do it? The key, unsurprisingly, is ads. Textfree has gotten such massive distribution that it can now turn a profit by placing ads in the application (the company has been profitable since December). Textfree doesn’t insert ads into your conversations — rather, it shows basic display ads which get 1.4 billion ad impressions a month. The application has been downloaded 7 million times which gives you an idea of its reach, but it’s also extremely engaging: users open it an average of ten times a day.

Using Textfree isn’t quite as straightforward as ‘normal’ text messaging, but users don’t seem to mind. The service assigns each user a new telephone number, free of charge. From then on you can text as much as you’d like, and can receive inbound texts that are sent to this special Textfree number. This can obviously be slightly irritating if you already have a phone number (i.e. on an iPhone), but remember, there are millions of devices running iOS that don’t have phone service, namely the iPod Touch. And Textfree gives all of those users the ability to text as much as they’d like, provided they have a Wifi connection.

The iPod Touch has proven to be Textfree’s bread-and-butter — 70% of its users are on the device. And Pinger says that carriers actually like their service, because it turns all of these iPod Touch users into extra nodes — they may be sending free text messages, but they’re certainly going to be sending and receiving messages from users who are on traditional carriers.

Textfree originally launched last year as a premium application that would charge users $6 per year for unlimited texting. That proved to be quite popular, but Pinger found that it could do even better by shifting the app to a free model and relying exclusively on advertising to generate revenue.

Apple Announces The New iPod Touch: Dual Cameras, Retina Screen

Apple unveiled the new iPod touch today at their special event, along with several other music- and media-related devices. Of course, we’ve been hearing murmurs and leaks about it for some time now, and the new device pretty much tallies with our expectations.

The two big improvements are the Retina screen and the dual cameras. The screen is the same found in the iPhone 4: 960×640, 3.5″, all as expected. The cameras are also the same as the iPhone; I’m thinking they got a bulk deal on the 5-megapixel sensors The rear camera does 720p, but only takes pictures at 960×720 (?!); the front-facing VGA camera is the same. Steve went so far as calling the iPod touch the “iPhone without a contract.”

It’s running an A4 processor, and is available with up to 64GB of space. It seems to have all the same internals, including gyro, accelerometer, and microphone, though of course it lacks the 3G radio and GPS (it’ll still do limited location). Historically the iPod touch has had a different PCB layout and that sort of thing; we’ll find out when we see the first teardown. FaceTime will work between the iPod touch and iPhone, by the way.

Here are the price points:

• 8GB:$229
• 32GB:$299
• 64GB:$399

The styling is a bit of a cross between the old iPod touch and the new iPhone 4. It’s very thin and chromey, but without the flat sides. It’s a tenth of an inch thinner, and has an ever-so-slightly smaller footprint.

Steve mentioned that they’re outselling both Nintendo and Sony in gaming. Believable, but I’d like to see the actual numbers. Most of the games sold on the iPhone and such are less than $5; it is of course a highly complicated thing to compare devices as unlike one another as iOS devices and game consoles, handheld or not.

The new 4.1 update should ship with these, including the new Game Center and other goodies.The new iPod touches will be shipping next week, but you can pre-order them now.

Update: the specs on Apple’s page note that the new iPod touch only takes still pictures at 960×720. That’s some nonsense. If the sensor can capture 1280×720 video at 30FPS, surely it’s capable of better stills. If the sensor is only capable of 960×720 images and they’re just stretching it to 1280×720, I’m going to have an image quality hissy fit.