To celebrate the opening of their new AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, AT&T is talking about some of the ambitious projects that they and their partner developers have been cooking up. One of the most interesting so far is AT&T Messages, which attempts to make all of your messages, voicemails, and call logs accessible from multiple devices.
Their cloud communications concept sounds quite a bit like the messaging half of Google Voice, but AT&T Messages has a few distinct advantages. One big one is the fact that it integrates with your existing AT&T phone number without any extra legwork. Any message sent to an existing AT&T number gets pushed into the cloud, where it’s viewable from any other compatible device.
Another thing: while Google Voice does an excellent job of making text messages and voicemails viewable on nearly anything with a web connection, it simply can’t deal with MMS messages. AT&T Messages plays with multimedia messages just fine, meaning that users who bounce between devices won’t have to live without all the funny cat pictures their friends send them.
A beta version of the Android app has been floating around for a few weeks, but it was just updated today, presumably to fix a few usability issues. Once the app has been installed, users can log into AT&T’s messaging portal from a computer to pick up from exactly where they left off. AT&T says that there is an iOS version in the works, and that a tablet compatible version will be released this fall.