Gmail Labs Adds Text Messaging To Gchat | Send SMS through Gmail !

Gmail Labs has added a very useful opt-in feature for sending text / SMS messages to mobile phones using the built-in Chat functionality.Gmail’s latest Labs experiment adds an option to send SMS text messages to contacts from the Google Chat sidebar, at no cost and with replies arriving as new chat lines. Like other Labs, you’ll have to enable it by heading to the Labs icon in your Gmail settings and enabling “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat,” although the feature is apparently being rolled out gradually to users.

Once enabled, you can type and choose a contact from the Chat sidebar and select “Send SMS” from the options that pop up to the right of their name, or select “Video & more” from the options dialog on a chat window. Enter a phone number, type your chat, and Google tells the recipient that they can reply like any other text. Gmail’s definitely making a play to become your all-in-one contact and messaging centre, and free text messaging is a powerful tool to getting there.

You can send SMS messages to your contacts’ mobile phones using Gmail Chat. To do so from Gmail:

1. Enter your contact’s name in the ‘Search or invite friends’ box in Chat, and select Send SMS from the box of options that appears to the right of your contact’s name. Or, if you already have a Chat window open for this contact, just click Video & more, and select Send SMS.

2. In the dialog box, enter a phone number in the ‘Send SMS messages to this number’ field. For now, this feature works only on United States phone numbers. If you’re outside the US, you can still use it, but you won’t see the SMS option in Chat until you enable it manually in the Chat settings page.

3. Click Save.

4. A Chat window appears. Just type your message as you would normally. When you hit Enter, the message will be sent to the phone number you entered.

If your contact replies, the text message response will appear as a reply in Chat. These conversations are stored in your Chat history just like regular chats (but keep in mind that you can’t go off the record while communicating via SMS).

[UPDATED: Google has rolled back the feature after finding a “glitch.” According to Google:

“When you’d try to turn it on, it wouldn’t fully enable. We thought about keeping it out there — bugs and all — but the experience wasn’t that great. So, in the spirit of Labs, we’ve pulled SMS chat back to fix it, and we’ll get it back out to you as soon as it’s ready — probably within 2 weeks, so stay tuned.”

If you’ve tried out Gchat-powered texting, tell us your experiences in the comments.