sms

The first world is fixated on smartphones that can handle videoconferencing and first-person shooters, but Google and Orange announced a service today that's geared for a population whose phones only have that most basic of data-transfer abilities, text messaging.

Google and Orange, the mobile arm of France Telecom, announced a partnership today to bring a service called Gmail SMS Chat to four additional countries in Africa--Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea Conakry, and Niger--and to launch it as a trial program in Egypt. The service already is available in Senegal, Uganda, and Kenya, but will reach the new countries in … Read more

The official Skype app for Android lets you place voice calls to landlines, mobile numbers, or other Skype users. It also offers built-in SMS capabilities, instant messaging for chatting with your Skype connections, and for a select few supported devices, video calls.

Skype's user interface is incredibly clean and simple to use. The Home screen displays four icons to cover all your basic needs: Contacts, Recent, Call phones, Profile. Above the icons, there's a small bar where you can change your mood message (Skype's version of a status update). And at the very top, there's a … Read more

Knowing who sent you a text message before even looking at your phone is extremely convenient, especially if you are the type who receives many SMS messages daily. One way to know who is on the other end of that SMS you just received, is to customize the text alert, based on a contact, on your iPhone. It is a simple process to set up, but one that is easy to miss if you aren't paying attention.

While this capability has been around for those in the jailbreak community from early on, it's a fairly new feature having been introduced in iOS 4.2. 

… Read more

Yesterday's batch of free iPhone games got me in the mood for more free stuff. I mean, even cheap deals cost money, right? Sometimes you just gotta give the credit card a rest.

With that in mind, I've rounded up a handful of freebies for today. Nothing earth-shattering, but some worthwhile stuff to satisfy your daily-deal sweet tooth.

First up, Amazon is offering a free $2 credit for use at its MP3 store. Just click that link and enter code CLOUDMP3. Presto: you've got two bucks to blow on the songs or album of your choice. (If … Read more

Sending group messages to family and friends is a great way to communicate with everyone without having to retype or copy and paste a message over and over. The iPhone just so happens to be capable of sending and receiving group messages. Even though the phone used in the video is running iOS 5, this feature has been around for a while and is not iOS 5 specific.

Enabling this feature is simple:

Go to Settings > Messages > Group Messaging and turn it on. That's it!

Now, when you send a group message, if the other user has … Read more

The latest build for Windows 8, known as Build 7989, has leaked onto the Web, reportedly revealing a batch of potential new features.

Windows has long offered a virtual keyboard. But with Windows 8 destined for tablets and other mobile devices, Microsoft has reportedly revamped the keyboard with a new look and feel. Unlike the current keyboard, which requires mouse clicks to operate, the new keyboard will offer touch friendly buttons along with a split keyboard option, according to WinRumors, which has posted a video demo of the new virtual keyboard.

The Win 8 keyboard will reportedly provide built-in support … Read more

Perhaps when iOS 5 arrives this fall, it will offer a way to delete text messages en masse. Currently, your deleting options are limited in the iPhone's native texting app, which is disappointing to anyone with dozens if not hundreds of old text messages littering your inbox.

At the present, you have three methods to delete texts:… Read more

Glympse is a brilliantly conceived mobile application that lets you share your real-time location via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook. It's a useful, easy-to-use tool that doesn't require you to sign up, create any profiles, or invite contacts.

Imagine asking a friend to meet you at a new restaurant in your neighborhood. With Glympse, you wouldn't text her the address; you'd merely send her a Glympse of your current location, and with a tap on her screen, she'd navigate her way there. Or if you're not yet at the restaurant, you might send her … Read more

The most audacious start-up pitches are those that propose changing people's communications habits. No matter how clever a company's technology or gorgeous an app's interface, getting users to adopt new modalities of communication is perhaps the hardest job in tech.

It's a social challenge as much as a technological one, which means that if you get it right, your technology spreads from person to person--virally, as the overused term calls it. Lately, social start-ups have been adopting strange, mutated viral models: Path is a social app that launched with a bizarrely limited way to join networks. Color opens you up to pop-up social networks based on physical proximity. Both clever but far outside most users' comfort zones.

A new app, CloudTalk (previously Pana.ma) is a person-to-person voice and video messaging app. On paper it looks like an unpleasant mashup of voice and SMS, but it's not. CloudTalk is a very smart system for sending asynchronous voice (or video or text) messages to your contacts, and I believe its interaction model is appropriate for the way people communication today--especially kids.

As CloudTalk founder David Hayden (formerly of Magellan and Critical Path) says, as we discuss the younger generation's growing reliance on text messaging, "It's not that kids don't like to talk. It that they don't like phone calls." CloudTalk is designed around recording voice messages. You can also send photos, videos, or text, but the interface favors voice. Conversations appear in a list window much like a iPhone's display of an SMS thread or an instant message chat.

I was skeptical that this app would add anything worthwhile to the standard quiver of smartphone communication tools we all have, but to my surprise it works well, and it's worth using. I've never seen an application that does such short work of sending voice messages or that makes it so straightforward to mix modalities in a message thread. If you want to reply to a voice message with text or video, it's easy. Or vice versa. The only thing you can't do yet is call or FaceTime a person for a real-time discussion from within an asynchronous thread.

It's easy to add people to your CloudTalk address book by scanning through your smartphone's address book to find people who are also CloudTalk users. You can also search the online directory for users you know, much as you can with Skype.… Read more