How can I choose between using iMessage or SMS when I want to send a message?

It turns out you can.

After hitting send - press and hold the blue bubble with the message you wish to send - a content menu will appear and offer to "Send as SMS"

Simples.

simple... if you want to send it as SMS turn off wifi or data and send you message....it would not be delivered yet so click on your message and send it as SMS. if you want to send it as imessage, turn on data and wifi again.

I don't think you can. If the person you are messaging has iOS 5 it will automatically use iMessage which is free (no carrier charge although it does go against your data quota if you have one). If the recipient is not on iOS 5 or not ani iOS device regular SMS will be used. With iMessage you can send photos like mms plus get things like notification when the other person has read your MSG

Although I don't know what happens if you turn iMessage off in

Settings/Message

Perhaps then everything goes as SMS.

But iMessage between iOS 5 devices doesn't incurr carrier charges if you have a limited messaging plan

Right now, the only way to force sending by SMS is to enter Settings > Messages and turn iMessage off.

iMessage automatically reverts to SMS delivery when there's no data, the message is not quickly delivered or iMessage is unavailable as a service if you enabled Send As SMS

Trying this, it doesn't seem to work.

It assumes that the name is the destination and doesn't perform the lookup to get the number.

It then reports "Your message was not sent. Tap Try Again to send this message." when you tap the red exclamation point.

I think it's not for you to change manually

It will detect the whether the one you sent is availible for using iMessage, if it is availible the color of the message we change to blue color, while SMS will remain in green one

It ***** that you can't choose between an imessage and a normal sms. Apple needs to sort this. A freind who did have an iphone, who now has a Samsung galaxy, cannot receive sms from me as he still has the same number.

Everytime i try to send him a txt it appears as a blue imessage and he doesn't receive the txt??

He still has his iphone at home which he uses as ipod etc but has his sim card in his Samsung...?

We are not sure whats going on here but WHY can't i just choose to send an imessage or a standard txt without going to settings and disabling it?

Dumb Apple.

Please fix.

Cheers

Yea, that's not going to cut it Apple. Like Dash68 up there I had an iPhone, and my wife still does. She has turned off iMessage because of this idiocy. She could not send me a text without jumping through hoops because I have an iPhone and an iPad with no SIM. We even tried turning those off completely and it still defaulted to iMessage. She couldn't even reply to a text I send her without it going to iMessage. SMS needs to be the default, with the option to do iMessage if both capabilities exist, not the other way around. I expect everyone with a friend that has an iAnything is affected by this. Surely people in Cupertino have friends that don't have iPhones and have experienced this themselves....maybe not.

Besides tapping on the bubble, the other thing you can do is remove your phone number from the list of addresses that receives iMessages. If you do that, it will always send message via SMS (assuming you send it to the phone number and not the e-mail address).

I assume you mean I can set my iPhone to not recieve texts sent to my phone number on my iPhone by removing that from the 'You can be reached for messages at' block in the messages setting section. Won't let me, it's grayed out. Has the phone number on it that this phone had a year ago and won't let me remove it. Suggestion makes sense, it just won't let me. SIM is inactive, but still in the phone. Wonder if I remove the SIM. Nope, SIM's out, number is still there and grayed out. Guess I can turn iMessage off on my iPhone. I notice my iPad doesn't seem to be a problem as that is just associated with email address(es). Would be great if I could get the number out of my iPhone, currently masquerading as a Touch.

Wait a minute. Turned iMessage off, and back on. Can be reached at just says two email addresses. The phone number block is trying to verify. Maybe it won't/can't with the SIM out. Have to wait till the wife gets home to see what happens now if she turns iMessage back on. Will it try to send to the phone number via iMessage and fail? making her do the tap and hold and force MMS, or will it just do MMS on its own. Stay tuned.

Well that does seem to work. I am in a perpetual ' verifying number' on my iPhone, which likely won't ever happen. I can however text my wife from my cell phone and it shows up coming from me on her iPhone. She can reply to that and it goes to my regular cell. I can iMessage her from my iPhone (Sans SIM), and it shows up on her iPhone as coming from me, but with a new thread. Replying to that, goes back to my iPhone, presumably via iMessage, and my iPad. Tuff to tell which me is SMS and which is iMessage on her phone, so we deleted the iMessage thread.

I did stick the canceled SIM back in my iPhone and it still seems to be unable to verify the phone number. That's fine. Will be turning off iMessage on that phone anyway, just for good measure. I'm unlikely to be using that device for messaging anyway. If I want to use iMessage I'll grab the iPad. It has no SMS capability in the first place.

BTW, still don't get the opportunity to just remove the phone number from the iMessage assortment of valid addresses. It is grayed out.

yes it does turn green like that, but it returns error on sending the message. in this case person was reachable via iMessage but i wanted to do sms your way. so it failed and it wasn't sent at all.