Verizon sent me a pretty cool text message on July 7. I would have written about it sooner, but I was, um, washing my hair…for, um, over two weeks.

Here’s what it said:

From: 900070003548
Free Verizon Wireless
Msg: We will give you a
$10 bill credit AND plant a
tree on your behalf when
you sign up for paperless
billing & autopay! Log on
to vzw.com/myverizon,
click profile, & update bill
options. Offer ends
7/13//08. To opt out of
future messages, reply X.

I thought that was a pretty cool offer, especially since I always view my bill online and never actually open the paper bill I receive at home. And a tree! Just for me? Just for getting rid of something I didn’t like anyway? Very cool. (more…)

Well, I’ll be.

Verizon is giving its prepaid customers a bit of a break. For just $10 a month, it’s letting those subscribers send unlimited text, picture, and video messages to other Verizon users, and to non-Verizon subscribers, they can send 250 messages. (You can read the RCR article about it here.)

This comes just a few weeks after T-Mobile raised its charge for texting from 15 to 20 cents a message, just as Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T have done in the recent past. This raised quite a few dogs’ hackles. One in particular at CrunchGear.com had a bone to pick with AT&T when he did the math and realized that at $0.20 per 160 bytes, 1MB of data would cost $1310.72.

I suppose that Verizon got a whiff of the stink that followed that whole texting debacle and decided to throw us dogs a bone.

Woof.