Gmail has come up with another new feature, after the introduction of Gmail Tasks. The new feature will enable Gmail account holders to send SMS text messages via Gmail chat.

As of now, the feature is available for the U.S users only. However, if you have a U.S. phone number, even though you don’t live in the U.S., you can use this feature.

In order to take this advantage, the U.S. users need to activate the feature on their Gmail Settings, by following a few simple steps. They are:

• Go to the Labs tab.
• Enable “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat.”
• Once you save the feature, type in your friend’s phone number in the search box in the chat window.
• The contact list of your friends can also be accessed. After that you can add a particular contact’s phone number. It’s all that simple!

According to Google, “On the receiving end, when you get a text message from Gmail on your phone, it will come from a number in the 406 area code. (The l33t folks in the crowd will note that this spells G0O.) You can reply to this text on your phone just like you’d reply to any other text. The reply gets routed back to our Gmail servers and shows up in your friend’s Gmail chat window. Each of your friends’ messages will come from a different 406 number so you can reply to any message and it will get back to the right person. Messages from the same person will always come from the same number, so you can even bookmark it in your phone.”

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 6:09 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.