Vodafone claiming here they are first to the RCS table.

http://blog.vodafone.co.uk/2014/09/10/understanding-message-and-rcs-why-were-giving-you-the-future-of-texting-before-anyone-else

Any news from the other networks when their RCS rollout is coming. This upgrade to sms kinda makes what's app worthless don't you think, would not be happy if i recently spent $19bn on it

Don't underestimate the mobile industry's ability to screw things like this up. Think MMS.

It's already late and the ship might have sailed.

The killer is going to be having to download another app, if most people already have WhatsApp installed they aren't going to want to download another one from their network which does pretty much the same thing.

The stock app on many android handsets is capable of RCS i beleive so no need to download a network version.

Edit: just tested a colleagues G3 and HTC one on vodafone. Their stock sms apps are capable of sending RCS and the app says they are in chat mode rather than SMS

Your not wrong there. Especially as it looks like Vodafone are the only ones too have made any noises about RCS.

Guess I'll just have to live with whatsapp still with my non Vodafone friends

Starting to see more contacts showing up on my phone as 'Chat' enabled in the messaging app.

Is this just people moving to Vodafone or has another network turned on RCS?

Agreed it looks interesting but its 5 years too late and im not convinced it will be widely adopted.

Just vodafone for now.

As far as I'm aware we won't see RCS services from other networks until VoLTE launches and they'll integrate RCS with VoLTE.

Vodafone will be launching Call+ in 2015 btw.

Sounds interesting but i don't see how it should be a standalone product just now as i'd have left it until VoLTE. Early year news headline winner...

"What makes Message+ great is that your offline recipient get sent a text or MMS instead." Hopefully it warns you that you may get charged for the MMS....

The vodafone app message+ has a setting to stop chat messages going as mms.

You dont have to use message+ though, the stock messaging app on android phones appears to support rcs. Certainly does on my phone and my friends htc one

I was looking at the stock app for a Note 4 and none of these options appear? Even gone as far as downloading the Google Messenger app (which replaces the stock sms app), and same thing.

Any advice?

It also leaves less space for significantly more useful apps you can download on your mobile.

Another bad thing is several of these unwanted pre-installed apps. You can't uninstall them but you have to keep updating them to keep your phone from running erratically. Originally 2MB, 4MB or 8MB in size e.g. when you first got your mobile. A few updates later they have balooned to 25MB, 40MB or 60MB plus cache and data leaving your mobile with even less space to download and update apps.

And how do you manage this when roaming, if its using the data connection, then maybe RCS is the cross-platform (and thus integrated) version of Apple's iMessage?

When roaming many networks charge a lot for MMS ; and I know plenty of people who disable MMS and use WhatsApp only for pictures due to having unlimited SMS anyway.

On the LG G3 under the wireless and networks section i had to activate a toggle under the heading CHAT SERVICE

Then the messaging app on the phone works with rcs chat features.

Text my friend with the htc one. His just started working automarically after an OS Update.