Google Launches Gmail Over SMS In Emerging Markets | Hacker News Reader

Google Launches Gmail Over SMS In Emerging Markets

techcrunch.com

43 pointsmitchie_luna17 comments

Link to actual release: http://google-africa.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/send-and-receive...

Apparently you can text "MORE" to see more of an email. So are users limited to 140-character chunks, or will Google expand this into MMS?

For that matter, how widespread is MMS vs SMS in emerging markets?

Most cell phones produced in the last 5 or even 10 years automatically concatenate chunked SMS. Looking at the screenshots, the capacity is at least 6*140.

I read this news with an incredible sense of synchronicity. Two hours ago I was eating a Subway sub and thinking how handy it would be to receive emails in my old Nokia phone via SMS. I do have an Android phone, but I don't take it in my bike rides. This SMS feature would be very welcome.

Edit: typo on 'synchronicity'

Or on an even broader scale: delivering timely content, news in particular, to those without computers, via SMS.

If you don't particular care about the privacy of those messages - and let's face it, it's non-encrypted email - there's plenty of cheap email-to-sms gateways out there. You just need to register for one and then set up a filter to forward the messages (keeping a copy on Gmail).

Thanks!

One of the benefits mentioned is essentially having a record/backup of sms messages. I've always felt bad about loosing all my text messages when I get a new phone or run out of space.

With my past few phones I've used this app to save all my sms messages to my Gmail account: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles....

You don't lose SMS if you're on iOS, your new device has all the content of the old one. That's a nice part of the walled garden I suppose.

All SMS or just iMessages?

All SMS. To the user there is no meaningful distinction between SMS and iMessage, except for the extra features. My mother, as an example, just thought that some contacts were green and some were blue as a nice way to make things interesting.

That's one of the things I like about Google Voice.

Very interesting. This is a brilliant idea but I'm honestly surprised something like this wasn't done by RIM(Blackberry). This is a major market for Blackberry and they are still releasing new 2G phones(e.g. 9220 just released).

I feel like missing those sort of opportunities is pretty much why RIM is doing so poorly these days. It seems like they forgot what they are and what they do best.

And today, I was just thinking about ditching my data plan on my iPhone (or more exactly, getting a MVNO SIM and turning off 3G). And of course, that made me wonder if there was an app for accessing dial-up.

Isn't it a security hole? Normally, you work with Gmail using https, and sms messages are plain text which could be read and/or collected by mobile operators.

For a security conscious user, probably. For the regular user, I'd say it's way, way more probable that their PC is infested with email stealing malware than their mobile provider selling the SMS or someone using GSM sniffing equipment.

Now we can look forward to 419 scams in text-speak :/

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