“Cell phone text messaging is a convenient way to communicate with someone when speaking on the phone isn’t appropriate. The process of entering a message on a cell phone’s number pad, however, is less than convenient. If your Mac is handy, you can use iChat instead to send messages to your friend’s cell phones,” Jeff Gamet reports for The Mac Observer.
Gamet reports, “Chatting with a friend’s cell phone works just like chatting with someone else on iChat. Their phone even shows up as online whenever it is turned on. Just be sure to keep your messages short because some phones will clip the length to a specific number of characters.”
Gamet give quick and easy illustrated directions here.
Cool, been waiting for this
Who knew it was that easy?
What isn’t ‘easy’ is paying a quarter (or whatever) per message. For ONE message this is trivial. For a dozen or so a month it’s still no big deal. Then there are those who could see a dozen or more on a typical DAY! That’s the price of a burger, and you have no record of it, can’t deduct it, and might not be able to remember it.
Maybe not the best plan for most of us.
Does this work for overseas cell phones aswell ?
In Australia it doesn’t seem to work.
You could do this via most AIM-compatible clients for a couple years now. Nothing new. Still nice to see it implemented in iChat though.
Yeah – does anyone know how to get this to work in the UK? I assume adding the +1 before the contact’s telephone number indicates a US location. Therefore, I’ve tried adding a +44 to my contact’s number, but this didn’t work. Neither did omitting the initial ‘0’ in the number or dispensing with the national code altogether. Any tips?
I guess this is a US only feature doesn’t work in the UK 🙁 (and yes I tried the UK code +44)
i have known about this feature for almost 3 years now. i saw it being demoed in the apple store theater in SoHo. it’s just gaining attention now?
i thought everyone knew this.
and yes. the girl who did the demo said it only works in the US.
I wonder if you can adapt this technique to get it to work with Adium?
Look it up. I know with cingular your cell phone is given an email address. You can email stuff to phones. It costs more unless your on a text messaging plan. but for an emergency it is ever so convient.
Akido:
Yes, it works in Adium, Fire, and most AIM-compatible clients. Just send an IM to the phone number with “+1” in front of the area code (no quotes and no dashes). Any phone capable of receiving SMS will work with this technique.
Was just checking over here in Germany with +49, same result as the guys in the UK: nope, wasn’t working.
A shame Europe’s (and obviously the rest of the world) left out again… .
Someone Else:
Thanks.
This is ichat in leopard not tiger…..
As many have said… this is very VERY old news.
I do this on just about a daily basis, as do my friends to my phone.
you can also login on http://www.aim.com and setup IM’s to automatically go to your phone if your away or idle. So most of my friends text my phone from their computers just by IMing my usual AIM account. It works with any IM client that uses AIM.
No, the screenshots are iChat Tiger, not Leopard.
DUDE… this has been working for more than 3 years! How far behind is this guy!??
This has been around for a long time
Like three years old
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030625235057445
So what if this has been around for 3 years or more??
Some of the readers here probably didn’t know about it (I’d heard about it, but not given it a go before today.)
Some of you are such childish wankers.
p.s. It totally sucks that this doesn’t work outside of the US.
Does it work with a group of numbers at a time?