Chat feature in Gmail is capable of doing more than instant messaging or text chat. You probably know about video conferencing and voice calls from Gmail but now it went one step ahead and brought Free SMS in Gmail. You can send message in SMS via Gmail to your contacts from any country even when they are offline.
SMS in Gmail isn’t exactly new feature. I mean some of you may have already enabled it from Labs but used to get an error that mobile carriers is not supported. But now, Gmail welcomes you with “Free SMS in Gmail” pop up giving the list of mobile networks supported in India and 50 other countries.
In India, it supports Aircel, IDEA, Loop Mobile, MTS, Reliance, Tata DoCoMo, Tata Indicom, Vodafone (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Gujarat, A.P, Bihar, W.B. & A & N, Assam, N.E. circles only). I am still wondering why the giants like Airtel and BSNL aren’t in the list.
How To Send SMS From Gmail
There are two ways to send SMS from Gmail:
- Enter the phone number in the text box which reads “Search, chat..” and Gmail offers an option to send SMS to that number. You may have to assign a contact to that number before sending.
- If phone number is already associated with any contact. This is generally seen in the Google accounts associated with Android phones where contacts have phone numbers. In this case, open the chat window and click on More on upper-right corner of chat box and click “Send SMS”.
- 50 SMS Credits or 50 SMS are free initially in every account. After that, you will have to buy credits.
- If you send a reply message, your SMS credit is increased by five.
- Each account has unique phone number.
- If you receive SMS from someone, you can reply to that number and person will receive that message in conversation.
- Person from any country can send Free SMS to any country from Gmail. (check the supported mobile operators)
- If you receive an unwanted SMS message from Gmail Chat, you can block future messages from the sender. Just reply to the message with the word ‘BLOCK’.
SMS From Gmail on Phone
This is how it appears when you receive SMS from Gmail contact. Phone number is different (not related with the user). Email ID of the contact is shown in email followed by the message sent.
As you can notice, the number from which SMS is received is a general/regular number not premium one. So, sending reply to this one will charge normally.
That is indeed a nice move by Gmail but I am waiting for the day when Gmail will introduce Email alerts via SMS. That is more important because Data connection may not be available all the time and some people check mails often.
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