Dec 10, 2008
Text Messaging Added to GChat – Could Be Better!
Answering all my prayers (well, the ones about adding text messages to Gmail), Google has added text messaging capability. It’s only in chat mode for now, but can straight texting from Gmail be far behind? Thinking this is probably for Android, but who knows. I was hoping that a response from the phone to the text would automagically save the person’s cell phone email address in your phone, but alas. Google is too tricky for that.
Text Messaging in Chat
Send SMS text messages right from Gmail. You chat from your comfy computer and reach your friends on the go; they get your messages as texts and can peck out replies on their little keyboards.
To get it to work, go to the Lab tab in the Settings menu and enable this feature.
That does sound awesome, but I don’t get what you mean by “response from the phone to the text would automagically save the person’s cell phone email address in your phone.”
To clarify… Phones have email addresses that you can email, like #@mobile.att.com etc. But if you want to use these, you need to know which carrier your friend has. I was hoping this was how Google would do it. You send a text, Google figures out which carrier your friend has, sends the text, and then when they respond, it’s an email from their phone instead of a text/chat…
I was actually more excited about the other new Google Labs feature for Gmail: Tasks. I’m not sure why it’s over on the right side, but the auto-nesting with the tab button is sweet, as is the hierarchy of completion, etc.
If they add priorities I will be pleased. I was also a little surprised to see that they used a “folder” structure instead of tags, but that’s no big deal.