The SMS idea came from a developer, and may be his own idea...?

The subject came up because he was talking about SMS extensions, and explaining that if the platform supported it, you could send a lot more than 160 characters. Symbian phones, he said, support this; Palm doesn't (but they say now that they're aware of the problem, they'll work to include it in the next rev of the OS) and Microsoft doesn't (and said it was none of their business, and that applications should do that, or third party providers)

The logic of it was that you can't be sure any particular phone has GPRS set up; but you can be about as sure as it is possible to be that it has SMS active.