CrunchGear

I’ll preface this by saying that SMS in its current state is perfectly fine. Nothing needs to be changed. Well, UK’s Affle and India’s Airtel are thinking differently and someone over yonder needs to smack some sense into them. If you have a Series 60 phone then I feel incredibly sorry for you.

The way SMS 2.0 works is that your handset will be updated periodically throughout the day with ads that are cached and every time you go to text someone an ad will pop up. The cached ads that are updated via GPRS in the background are supposedly based on user relevance, which is said to be accurate approximately 75 percent of the time. I’m sorry, but this will never ever fly with me or anyone else. Unless there is some sort of incentive involved from the carrier, I’ll just call people instead of texting them. It could be a different story if I were to text a friend and see what they were doing for dinner, which would in turn trigger an e-coupon for local restaurants that I could just whip out. Other than that, no thanks.

Are you ready for SMS2.0? [Tech Ticker]