Just earlier in this thread someone said they used it to wake up their son, I think. I do think that that's a bit of an annoying use, and I have my own opinions about parental involvement in kids lives and kids simply accepting parental control, but that's beside the point - assuming the reason for doing so was a good one, sending message spam in bursts to another phone allows you to get people's attention who otherwise wouldn't notice one or two phone messages going off.

I've had plenty of cases where I was either worried about someone's wellbeing or needed someone to give me some bit of information relevant to an urgent decision, and they didn't have their phones within easily-audible reach, or weren't paying attention. Now, I'm not thinking sending hundreds of messages to one phone in such a case is okay. But sending 5-10 in 30-60 second intervals would be nice. It gets you more phone rings than calling might, and unlike calling or manually texting, it's something you can fire off and then put your N900 in your pocket until you get a response. More likelyhood they'll notice.

Also, I just thought of what could legitimately be considered 'research'. With phone networks being as black-boxed as they are from the users, this really helps you measure something like SMS-network throughput - both in terms of speed (I send 30 messages, one-per-minute; check time stamps later on receiving phone to see when they came in), and how likely a message is to just 'vanish' into the dark web that is cell phone networks - I've had plenty of instances of messages from my partner (girlfriend doesn't properly describe relationship, but we're not legally married or engaged either) to me or from me to my partner just never made it to the other phone.

Of course, open-source telephony + Phone-equivalent of NMap would probably be even better for such purposes, but people aren't working to make that a reality nearly as much as they should.