Showing posts with label sms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sms. Show all posts

Monday, August 21, 2006

How to send an SMS from cell phone to an AIM user

I'm not sure if this is common knowledge or not, but I only learned about it recently. Some cell phones let you sign on to instant messenger clients (usually AIM), but that can be less than ideal. When I did that a couple years ago, every single communication my phone did with AIM counted as a text message. That includes messages you send or receive, as well as sign-on related messages, and even disconnection messages. I'd get disconnected fairly frequently, and every time that happened, it would cost me 2-3 text messages to sign back on. At 10 cents a pop (unless you pay for a plan with a bucket of monthly text messages), that got annoying pretty fast.

Well, I recently found out that you can send a message to an AIM user, using your cell phone, without logging on with any actual AIM client. Just send an SMS text message with the following format:

Recipient: 265010
Message: AIM_screen_name: message text

I know there are all sorts of "mobile AIM" features, but this is one simple one that has come in handy several times for me, already.