Those of you that know me, probably know I’m a Google Fan. Ok, I know they’re not perfect (who is), but I like the way they integrate most of their services together. I say most – it’s about time you guys at Mountain View did something cool with GrandCentral!
Anyway, I digress.
What I want to write about in this post is the new Sms service from Google.
Not only do I use Gmail exclusively as my email client, but I also send and receive a lot of text messages. I have an unlimited plan with Alltel, my cellphone provider.
I’m not a big fan of phone calls – most of the time they simply take too long – how many of us ever call someone, say exactly what we need to say, and no more, and then hang up?
I don’t use the Google Talk Client at all. Nope. I use the Chat Panel within GMail. Now, you can go into the lab settings, scroll down and enable SMS, and as long as you’ve got a current mobile number for the person in your chat contacts that you wish to call, you can simply send them a text message if they’re offline.
OK, I’ll admit that as a big time Twitter user, I’ll often use that instead, but with Twitter, the person you’re contacting needs to be following you, AND also get your Tweets via SMS too (or have a mobile Twitter client they check regularly) for this to work, as I found out recently trying to locate some local bloggers in the park for a meetup. I sent a whole bunch of messages out, but no-one replied, as they weren’t following me on their cellphones!
Two things you need to be aware of.
- So that you don’t tick off your friends, remember that although it’s 100% Free for you to send text messages to your friends, they might get charged by their cellphone provider to receive them, if they don’t have some kind of text message plan, and if they don’t have an unlimited plan, they might not thank you, if you send them too many. Best to check with them first, before you fall out with them, or they ask you to pay for 200 incoming texts you’ve sent them at 20 cents a pop - most cellphone providers make an outrageous charge for text messaging for those not on inclusive plans.
- This free service from Google is, at the time of writing, only available to US cellphone numbers. I don’t know why they didn’t include Canada – I can only think that Google couldn’t reach an agreement with Bell Canada and Rogers.
Anyway, I’ve already started using this service – albeit to test it with my wife – it seems to be almost as quick as IM itself too.
All in all, nice one Google. Now how about integrating GrandCentral so I can make calls on it right from my Gmail contact list? That would be a huge time saver for me, and I suspect many others.
