Wireless Hacks. 1917 IndustrialStrength Tips and Tools [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 14 SMS with a Real Keyboard

Stop fiddling around with your
phone's keypad and use your laptop for text
messaging.

Short Message Service (SMS) is better known as text
messaging for mobile devices. It has proven to be surprisingly
popular in many parts of the world (particularly Japan, the
Philippines, and much of Europe), but for one reason or another has
been less than enthusiastically received in the U.S. Part of the
barrier to entry for many people is the sometimes painful text entry
interface on most mobile phones. The demand for tiny phones has
squeezed out virtually all hope of a usable integrated keyboard.
While predictive text
technologies like T9 have helped make typing
require fewer keystrokes, the interface is still far from intuitive.
Many people find themselves obsessively hitting number keys in a
feeble effort to express themselves, most times mistyping one or two
letters along the way. And entering punctuation marks and symbols is
so inconvenient that most people don't bother.

If you have a Bluetooth-enabled
phone, there is hope. OS X
provides some very good integration with these devices and SMS. In
order to get started, be sure that Bluetooth is enabled and that your
phone is paired with your laptop as you normally would. When you
launch the Address Book with Bluetooth enabled, you
will notice an extra Bluetooth button at the top left corner of the
window (Figure 2-4). Click this button to enable
Bluetooth integration in the Address Book.

Having Bluetooth enabled turns on a number of useful features. In
addition to being able to simply dial the number directly from an
Address Book entry, you can also send an SMS message. Click the label
to the left of the number you want to message (Figure 2-5) and select SMS Message.
This opens a small textbox for you to type in your message. Lo and
behold, you can use your standard keyboard to enter SMS messages!

The Address Book also gives you possibly the most useful
Caller ID implementation there is. When
your phone rings, Address Book will pop up a window with the name and
phone number of the person calling (Figure 2-6).
You can choose whether to answer the call, send them straight to
voice mail, or send them an SMS message.

Clicking SMS Reply sends the call to voice mail,
but also opens a window allowing you to enter an SMS message. As long
as the Address Book app is open, incoming SMS messages will be
automatically displayed, and will allow you to reply via SMS as well.
While not nearly as portable as SMS on a mobile phone, using a
regular keyboard with SMS can help you be more expressive much more
quickly.

Incidentally, one very good application for SMS messaging is in
situations where mobile phone coverage is flaky on one side (or both
sides) of the conversation. In areas where mobile voice calls drop
out frequently or aren't even possible, SMS messages
will automatically be retried until they get through. This can be
ideal for squeezing in a quick message to a friend when you
can't otherwise establish a phone call. A low
bandwidth message that gets through no matter what can be infinitely
more useful than a high bandwidth message that just never gets there.
SMS, for all of its faults, can be the ideal communications medium in
many situations.