iMessage is so slow!

Hi.

My wife and I both have iPhone 4S, running iOS 6.0.1. And recently iMessage has been frustratingly slow. By slow I mean one of us will send a message as iMessage, with the "send" button blue and the bubble blue and everything... And it won't arrive at the other end for 15, even 30 minutes sometimes. Then other times it works and it's instant.

This happens both with wifi and 3G networks. And neither of us have ANY problems otherwise with those networks. We also both have read reports turned ON, so we can see when we need to "send as SMS" (which is fairly often)...

We've tried turning iMessage off and on. That sometimes seems to help TEMPORARILY.

We've tried turning FaceTime off (I read they are connected somehow). That doesn't help.

We've tried turning the phone off and on again...

We've tried lots of things and we're both bemused.

We are both new to the shiny shiny world of Apple. And to be honest, it's not quite as amazing as we expected. Not to mention the absolutely appalling battery life.

I feel like Basil Fawlty, but honestly, what is the point of it if it doesn't bloody work??

And do we really have to turn stuff off and on again to get these supposedly amazing devices to work properly? Apple certainly don't advertise their devices as "great to use... If you turn all your apps off or better yet don't USE any apps at all, and reset it every 5 minutes, and oh yes don't forget to charge it every 2 hours if you actually use it for all the things we say it can do, and also, when things don't work as they should, you will feel like it's your fault and that YOU have done something wrong and not setup this BUILT-READY-TO-USE device properly... Oh and one more thing, it will cost you a fortune to buy. Have a nice day now."

I know Apple fan boys will hate me for that one.

So please! Help me! Set me straight! Tell me please that it's a common software related problem and that the good folks at Apple know about it and really do care, and have actually communicated with someone -hopefully a "user"- to tell us all that YES! it will be fixed for the next update.

Sorry I'm being so cynical. I'm just tired of iMessage being so slow and I need your help. I am thinking of getting Whatsapp, but don't want to clog up this phone with more apps, and I'd much rather use the inbuilt services if possible. That's why they're there, right? Am I right?

Many thanks. And again, sorry for my rant.

Jonathan :-)