HeyWire review

We review HeyWire, an iPhone instant messenger that adds free global text messaging to its chat arsenal

In many respects it seems odd that there’s a distinct divide between text messaging and instant messaging. They’re essentially the exact same thing, aside from the character limitations and cost of a text message.

But the HeyWire app looks to bring good old fashioned texting back in line with our instant messaging expectations.

There’s one obvious obstacle when talking about using texts as IMs: the cost. An app can’t make use of your contract’s bundled texts very easily – at least, not without you simply using the iPhone’s native messaging app, which kind of defeats the purpose.

HeyWire gets around this obstacle by fronting the cost of the texts sent from the app, and it offers to absorb these costs on a global scale. The app is ad supported in an effort to lessen the blow of sending out the world’s text messages for free, which feels like a very fair trade off.

When signing up, HeyWire gives you a unique “text number”, which friends and acquaintances can make use of for identifying you on the app’s network. They can also text to it directly, should they be on a dumb-phone, but that’s hardly a significant feature for iPhone users, since they could just text you the normal way.

But it certainly is a significant feature for iPod touch and iPad users. The app is universal, so it essentially gives you a way to send and receive text messages from Apple’s non-cellular devices.

It also leans toward the social networking side of messaging, by allowing you to text directly to Twitter, or tie in Facebooks chat function and Google Talk. And with its multi-screen and hierarchical structure, you can keep track of conversations very easily, while still being able to fire off a free text to up to 10 recipients at a time.

Despite its name (“HeyWire Fastest Texting – SMS” to give it its full title) the text messages weren’t exactly fast during testing. Whether the delay is caused by the text passing through an intermediary on the way to the mobile phone, or whether the operator is having a busy day, it’s hard to say. But side by side against a normal text message and a HeyWire message, the latter took five minutes or more extra to land.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, and could have been a quirk, but as it happened during testing it has to be mentioned. There’s no risk in grabbing this free app or testing it out for yourself, so it’s not losing any points for being a fraction slower than a text message that costs money.

If nothing else, the cross-platform aspect of HeyWire is very impressive, particularly since the developer has effectively made it compatible with almost every mobile phone ever made.

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