Wireless Hacks

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.

Figure 2-4. Click the ...