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Aug 15, 2011

New!!! Gmail offers free SMS chat …



Hello.

Have you noticed a "Send SMS" button on Gmail lately?

At first I thought it was something related to Google Voice, which is not available in my my part of the world. GV is totally useless to me, so I thought this SMS thing would never work in Maldives, but I tested it out anyway, and guess what, it seems to works perfectly well for local Wataniya subscribers.

So what is it? I did a little googling and it turns out its a two way chat system. Google allows Gmail users to send text messages from inside Gmail to a contact's mobile phone. The contact can then reply to the text message as one reply to a regular text message, and it shows up on my Gmail chat window. Nice!

How do you do it? Well, I think its an experimental feature on Gmail, so you have to first head over to Gmail labs to enable it. Go to Settings -> Labs -> enable SMS features.

It has been sometime since I have been requesting Wataniya to provide a way to let us send text messages to Wataniya subscribers from my desktop, something like WebSMS that Dhiraagu offers. Wataniya came short, but now, I can use Gmail to send text messages and I don't even even have to sign in to another service. Good stuff!

If you need more information about how this service works, here is the link to the official Google SMS help page. Give it a read.

Sending SMS from Gmail.

It is interesting to note that, currently there are about 20 countries on the list that support this service, and Maldives is on the list. Good going Wataniya and thank you!

Now log on to Gmail, and send some text messages! :)

Laterx.

1 comment:

email archiving said...

I am not too sure about this. For one I can just opt for the chat embedded on gmail. Or I can use other chat platforms as well.

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