Ditch your old ways of using text message & use these tricks to enhance it

Oh no, I’m not telling you to cut-off the QWERTY keyboard of your Treo or Centro smartphones. But you need to check out these useful tricks that can leverage the ways you used to click your smartphone’s keyboard for text messaging, where usually not very suitable for road warriors who are behind the wheels all the time:

1. Get an automatic assistant to remind you & make new schedules
Use your Google Calendar to alert you when the next meeting is about to take place, just click Edit> Event> Details and then Add a Reminder to it. You have to choose SMS and including the time it will send the notification to your mobile phone, and don’t forget to enable the Mobile Setup settings in your Google Calendar.
You also can retrieve every meetings schedule with text message, write “next” and send it to GVENT (48368); where you’ll get back a text message reply containing the time & details of the next event. You even can get a full list of today’s appointments by sending “day”, and “nday” for tomorrow.
Making new appointments is as easy as above, just write it in plain English language like "Lunch with Joe at Panera Bread tomorrow at noon.", and send it to GVENT too. Google will add it to your calendar, along with the time of the appointment mentioned: noon!

2. Speak up to compose your text message
I think you’ve guess this one; it’s Jott. The web service that lets you speak up the receiver name in its contact list (in your Jott account), and then transcribed everything you say into text message before sending it. But be careful, it’s dangerous to make phone calls while driving!

3. Google-up you directions
Another great free text messaging service from Google, but first you must decide your starting point and destination at Google SMS. After you’ve hit the road, just send “GOOGLE” text to 466453, you’ll get Google Maps in text messages form. You can even get an actual map if you write ‘map” & your location.

4. Beam up my files, Scotty!
Forgetting something is a natural brain disease, just joking I didn’t mean to scare you. But you do know how it feels when you forgot to bring important files to a remote client in a place where no internet rental cafés can be found, then this ‘Beam it up Scotty’ (BiuS) web service will save your day. Instead of emailing the needed files to your own email address, just upload them to BiuS. After entering you mobile phone number, you’ll get a text message containing a link to download the file. Best of all, BiuS can automatically compress any video & audio files that are uploaded by you, so they’ll be optimized for mobile phone playback usage.

There are many other tricks mentioned by Rick Broida (The Cheapskate) at his PC World piece here, he found 10 useful tricks. Which among them I’ve picked the ones that are using the most of text messaging feature, where IMHO is the cheapest way than using the more expensive data connection. I hope you’ll agree, enjoy & happy text messaging!

[blogged with my Treo 750v]