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Here in the United States, the cost of sending text messages from your cell phone continues to increase. From my iPhone, it costs $0.15 for each text message I send or receive. While you can purchase text packages to help mitigate this cost (I have a basic package of 200 messages for $5), you can save even more money by sending messages for free from iChat. Note: This hint likely only works for sending text messages to cell phone in the United States and Canada.
Setting up iChat for Text Messages
There are two ways you can send text messages in iChat:
First, if you’re like me, you’ve spent a little time using your Address Book application. When I put friends into my address book, such as John Smith, I add his mailing address, email address, cell phone number, and chat account. When I open iChat, I see the name “John Smith” instead of his user account, jts01444720. This is because iChat checks to see if there’s an Address Book entry with the chat name of jts01444720, and if it finds it, iChat displays the human name I’ve associated with the chat name (and mobile number):
What’s great about this system is that iChat associates all aspects of this Address Book card — not just the real name of the person but also the person’s mobile phone number, which is the phone number capable of receiving text messages.
Because I’ve already entered the mobile phone number for my chat friend in Address Book, I can open up iChat, look at my Buddy List, and right-click (or hold down the control key and click) on my friend’s name. This will cause a contextual menu to pop up and looks like this:
Now, if I click Send SMS, a chat window will open, and I can type whatever message I like. When I hit the Return key, the message will be sent as a text message to that friend — for free!
Using the Phone Number Method
As I said above, there is a second way to do this, and there are two reasons you might use this second method. First, the above method only works if your buddy is online. Obviously, your friend’s phone is likely turned on, even if his or her instant messaging client is not, and you’ll want to be able to send text messages from iChat in either circumstance. Second, if you want to send a text message to a phone number that is not in your Address Book, you’ll still want to be able to send the message.
How do you do this? From iChat, click on the File menu, then click on New Chat to open up a window that will ask who you’d like to send a message It looks like this:
From the From menu, you can select any chat account you’re using. It doesn’t matter. Most people probably only have one or two accounts.
From the Type menu, choose Text Chat (it’s the default option).
The key is the To field. Here, you want to put in the phone number that you want to send the text message to (without spaces, dashes, or parentheses), and you must put +1 in front of it. My fake phone number here is (503) 555-1212. Note to international users: Yes, the +1 is the international dialing prefix for the United States and Canada, and you can replace this country code with your own, but my friends in Europe assure me this doesn’t work.
Once you put the mobile phone number in the To field, you can click Chat, which will open a chat window. Again, here, you type your message, hit the Return key, and your message will be sent to that phone number! You can leave the window open and continue sending as many messages as you like.
Did this hint work for you? As there are many ways to send text messages from your Mac, do you have a better way of doing this? Let others know in the comments.
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