New Gmail Labs Feature Lets You Send SMS Messages to Friends

Today Google is rolling out an interesting functionality to Gmail Labs – sending SMS to your contacts and new phones instead of simple text messages in a chat. Quite predictably, the functionality only works in the US and ignores international users as it must involve certain agreements with carriers.

For some reason the official Gmail blog does not have any posts describing this new functionality but some reporters (including those from Webmonkey and eWeek) were briefed on the functionality so we will probably see it officially announced later.

The feature is very simple and straightforward: you can now choose to send an SMS to your friend instead of a regular text message if you already have a phone number added to this person’s contact information in your Google account or you can send a text message to a new phone number.

Google has also reserved thousands of phone numbers in 406 area so once you send a text message from Google Talk, one of such numbers is associated with your Google account and all the messages you send will show as sent from this number. The phone number works both ways so if the person you send a text message to replies to the phone number associated with your Google account, you will get the reply as a chat message as well.

Some things about this new SMS via chat are already criticized by users. For example, every message you send includes quite a lengthy header with your Google account in it so it limits the length of the message itself. Also after you send the very first message to someone, Google will automatically send a second message explaining that the previous one has been sent by Google and how it can be replied to.

I myself am quite a heavy user of SMS functionality on Skype where it is not free but offers a number of advantages like showing your real phone to the person who receives the message so that this person could reply to your cell phone directly. For a super lazy person like me who just hates typing anything on the phone itself this feature is definitely a blessing – especially since it is even cheaper than what I get if I send the messages directly from the phone. Besides, the fact that this functionality is not free makes it actually useful as you can send text messages to anywhere in the world for a fee no matter where you yourself are located.

But the new Gmail functionality is free and will most certainly be enough for the US users that prefer to do all the typing on the computer. Besides, if Google adds the feature to associate your real phone number with your Google account, this will certainly be a useful addition that some people could be even willing to pay for.

Image via Webmonkey