I saw this in my rss reader the other day but only got around to trying this today and once again google comes through BIG TIME!

Google have made my tablet even more useful by adding send SMS to gchat which routes chat into a sms message to a mobile phone. We already have the great Grand central dialer, if you are lucky enough to have a grand central account you can make FREE calls to the US and Canada, and now with google SMS you can make and receive FREE sms messages through the chat program.

Google give you a free 406 number which ties into your Gmail ID and people can sms you at that number which shows up in your gchat client. If you aren't online it goes to your chat archive in your google account. What would be absolutely great is if you could tie that 406 number to the grandcentral account...

Anyway I am babbling now but if you haven't check it out its going to be a pretty neat solution for tablets (especially wimax tablets or RX-51!) I'm going to start switching over to using this so I can go all-IP as soon as the new tablet launches. Now for google video chat

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/1...-sms-text.html

I had been using AIM for this in pidgin, worked pretty well.

My perceived downside of the AIM SMS gateway is the fact that the numbers "expire". If I send a message to someone's phone, they can reply back to my "number" only for an undermined amount of time. Google's version seems to assign a number that always works for the cell phone user to respond to then or in the future.

BTW, the format to use is +13334445555@sms.talk.google.com

Frank

Yeah I knew about the AIM version , but I as Frank points out, you can actually save the google SMS number and use that to send messages to for an indeterminate amount of time, they actually instruct you to do that.

anyone know how to get short codes to work with this? I'd like to get my twitter updates via gtalk SMS, but I can't send the confirmation to twitter's shortcode sms number (40404).

humm. how do i use this on my tablet? the chat box doesn't show up in gmail when i load it from my tablet.
thanks.

Hmm, I wonder if I could use this to get a phone number associated with my Skype account? They need to have a "mobile" number to send an SMS to, and then they will associate your Skype account with that number...

that would be really nice. let me know if you figure something out.

Doesn't look like I can try this. Canadian mobile numbers are rejected, so I can't send an SMS to find out what my Google SMS number is, and without that number, I don't have a number to put into Skype.

EDIT: Someone in the States could PM me with their mobile number, I could SMS them from my Google account, and they could then tell me what my Google SMS number is. But that's pretty complicated

i would, but my n800 is my mobile.