Google SMS

April 18th, 2006 | by Tim Wilson |

Samsung t809 Phone (T-Mobile)

My old mobile phone was acting up so I picked up a new one a few days ago. The Samsung T809 is pretty cool on its own, but I’ve had the most fun playing with Google SMS. If you haven’t ever tried text messaging, find a teenager somewhere and ask him or her for a quick “inservice.” With a little practice, and a predictive text system like T9, you can enter short messages pretty quickly. (T-Mobile is running a deal for unlimited messaging for $10/month right now. I wouldn’t be doing this if I had to pay for each message.)

Google’s SMS system makes it possible to check the weather, stock quotes, driving directions, sports scores, movie listings, and much more by sending a text message. For example, to get the current weather in Minneapolis, text “weather 55455″ to 46645 (GOOGL). Within ten seconds, you’ll get a text message back from Google with the four-day forecast.

You can’t do regular Google searches with their SMS interface, but try out a demo interface at the Google SMS page. Still think it’s useful to have students memorize state capitals? With over 160 million mobile phone subscribers in the U.S. alone, text “capital minnesota” to Google and watch the value of that knowledge drop to $0.

t809, google sms, sms, google

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  1. 6 Responses to “Google SMS”

  2. By Bob Roth on Apr 19, 2006 | Reply

    4INFO (shortcode 44636) has a similar mobile search text message offering, but provides several additional services that Google does not: text alerts (sports, weather, stocks), fantasy stats (”kobe bryant” “jaromir jagr”), flight times (”swa san jose san diego”) and a beta version of mobile download search. All these services can be accessed via SMS (44636), WAP at http://wap.4INFO.net , or at http://www.4INFO.net.

    Why 4INFO instead of Google?
    “When asked recently for the address of a trendy downtown Manhattan club called Butter, both 4INFO and Yahoo! located it on the first try. But Google sent back results better suited to baking.”
    - Wendy Widman, Forbes.com

  3. By Tim Wilson on Apr 19, 2006 | Reply

    Cool site. I like the ability to create custom alerts. Now I’ll know the MN Twins score as soon as the game is done.

  4. By Ass Monkey on Apr 27, 2006 | Reply

    Actually you can query google via sms by texting a ‘g’ in front of your query and it will give you up to two short snippets of the first few websites they list.

    http://www.google.com/sms/howtouse.html

  5. By Josh on May 14, 2006 | Reply

    I’d like to be able to receive SMS Alerts on my cell phone from Google when I receive new Gmail.

  6. By Tim Wilson on May 14, 2006 | Reply

    You could have Gmail send you a copy of each email message via SMS. You could also have it send only certain messages to your phone based on a filter that you would create. For example, you could forward only those messages from a certain group of senders, with a subject line containing certain text, etc. -Tim

  7. By Melvin on Dec 19, 2006 | Reply

    Can anyone recommend me?
    I need an free sms service for my homepage.
    I am seeking one with the option to change the design(for a bit).
    Thanks a million!

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