Friday, October 14, 2011

Multi-Device Sync in iMessage

So faithful readers will know that I was a big Kik Messenger fan,, and used it to handle keeping in touch with world + dog given my nearly insane transatlantic flight schedule.

I decided, however, to give up the Android experience (keep meaning to blog about that) and use my old iPhone 3GS as my US phone, and my new (on its way) iPhone 4S as my UK phone. This, plus my iPad 2 (whose SIM I change in the plane in between London and New York), means that I can hopefully get my multi-device sync on and communicate with the vast majority of people that I SMS/IM to, who all have iOS devices.

However, I upgraded both my iPad and my iPhone to iOS 5, and iMessage wasn't synchronizing properly. Apparently this, the killer feature in iMessage (and the only one that's superior to Kik thus far in my experimentation), doesn't work out of the box. You have to change your phone settings to enable it.

  1. Go to Settings > iMessage
  2. Select "Receive At":
  3. Make sure at least one Email is set (and is set on any other iOS device you have), and then choose "Caller ID":
  4. Pick the email address you want to use (and make sure it's the same on all iOS devices):

And then you're in business! Shame they didn't make it default to this...

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