Comments on: Tip o’ the Week: Free SMS from your iPhone

By: Thom

Thom — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:41:30 +0000

well I dunno…she’s on ATT and it’s not a smart phone or anything like that…just a regular flip phone…next time i see her I’ll try it so I can watch what happens. It could be, as you know, that some people aren’t into this kind of thing or don’t like being techinically challenged with phones and computers etc, which I totally respect, so I’ll just see what it does when I can view the phone. Thanks again Brian

By: Brian Hart

Brian Hart — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:07:55 +0000

@Thom – not sure what phone or service your friend is using. My experience was sending a message via AIM to my Palm Centro. The Centro received the msg as a regular text message. I merely hit ‘reply’ and sent a message back. I’m not sure why your friend is having difficulty replying

By: Thom

Thom — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:55:59 +0000

Ooops Brian I meant “where you sent the IM from” should be “where you sent the IM to”

By: Thom

Thom — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:54:32 +0000

Brian thank you. When you responded did you create a new text message from the phone where you sent the IM from iPhone AIM and that’s how it appeared in the AIM? The problem my friends had is they couldn’t respond directly from the text from AIM that I sent. Thanks again

By: Brian Hart

Brian Hart — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:08:05 +0000

@Andrew and Thom: first, thanks for your comments! Hopefully I can answer both of your questions at once. In my experience, I’ve been able to send the text message via AIM to the recipient. I did this just now, sending the AIM message to another cell phone number I have. It arrived at my other phone as a standard text message. I replied, like normal, and the reply message appeared as a response in AIM (so keep AIM running when you do this). Try again and see if it works. Remember that, as far as I know, this only works in the U.S. and could be carrier-specific (but I have no idea).

By: Thom

Thom — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:19:03 +0000

I set this up and sent an IM to two different people. Both of them couldn’t not reply. It says No Reply Allowed. Any suggestions? Thank you

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:12:09 +0000

OK, here’s my question… can people REPLY to your messages? and, if so, where will the replies get delivered to???

By: stuart

stuart — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:40:17 +0000

I can add buddies – but whether added via the iPhone AOL app or via iChat, mobile numbers immediately go Offline once added, and then whenever I try to send a message I’m told “AOL Error: The other person appears to be currently offline”. If it makes a difference, I’m in the UK. Has anyone else seen this, or worked out a way around it?

By: David

David — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:39:12 +0000

And just to be clear, if AIM is not active on the window, we won’t receive the messages from others right?

By: David

David — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:36:08 +0000

This works like a charm. I wonder how much of a drain having AIM open will be on my battery though.

By: Rene Ritchie

Rene Ritchie — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:22:45 +0000

@Brian: Classy.

By: Chris Pepper

Chris Pepper — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:00:58 +0000

Thanks for making those changes, Brian.

By: Dieter Bohn

Dieter Bohn — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:00:31 +0000

Article updated. Though I guess we could argue that methods fall under patent law instead of copyright law, we certainly don’t want to create any bad feelings. Plus, we’d probably be wrong anyway.

By: Brian Hart

Brian Hart — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:52:23 +0000

Thanks for your concerns, Chris. The posting has been updated to address the concerns. The process is simple enough that screenshots are probably not necessary, and they have been removed. I also wish to point out that I did take pains to give credit to both Jeff Carlson and TidBITS.com (link provided to his article) in the original write-up. I hope this addresses your concerns as we all enjoy TidBITS.com over here.

By: Chris Pepper

Chris Pepper — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:21:52 +0000

Brian,

It would have been better to write your 2-para intro, and then link to Jeff’s article http://db.tidbits.com/article/9690 directly. The TidBITS license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ under which Jeff published specifically does not permit derivative articles like this one.

Also, it’s sad that you don’t credit Jeff in the byline, since you used so much of his content — topic, photos, and specifics.

By: Brian Hart

Brian Hart — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:55:03 +0000

ematts, you need to set up the number on your desktop app. I opened up iChat on my Mac, added my other cell # per instructions (i.e., +18015551212), and it works like a charm. The key is creating the new “user” from your desktop. Hope this helps!

By: Rollo Martins

Rollo Martins — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:56:42 +0000

I suggest someone go there and write an entirely new SMS app which includes SMS, MMS, such options as just mentioned in the article and some more missing features (like precise time stamps, a display of the number of chars you already entered, and, finally, A BIGGER FIELD TO ENTER THE TEXT. That loophole is definitely too small, you can hardly scroll…). I’d pay 20 bucks. And I guess some more people would…

By: Earless puppy

Earless puppy — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:16:06 +0000

question:

If aim allowed you to attach a picture from the camera roll to a IM, this would solve half the MMS issue

By: ematts

ematts — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:34:33 +0000

I tried this doing everything from the iPhone and after hitting send, I got "Unable to send IM...Your message was blocked from being sent."

The new account (phone number) I set-up was on AIM adding it to the iPhone, never on the desktop.

I used screenname as the number in AIM. I tried this on 2 different cell phone numbers.

By: Computermilk

Computermilk — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:08:59 +0000

Nice tip!