For a little while, I’ve been mulling starting a recurring feature here on MobHappy called Things My Phone Should Do, which would pretty much do as advertised: reveal the things that I think my phone, in an ideal world, would do (and of course give you plenty of opportunity to leave a comment saying that what I want is indeed possible, and has been for sometime, so I should start paying more attention, and so on). Now, Sprint’s gone and pre-empted what I was going to talk about in the first entry in the series: being able to receive and respond to text messages via my computer.
My basic thinking was that I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and when I’m doing so, it makes more sense to me to receive SMS on it, and be able to use the keyboard to craft a reply. Clearly I hadn’t thought this through much, as a cursory Google search reveals the Mac address book application can do exactly this, which is nice to know, at least for me and other Mac users with Bluetooth-enabled GSM phones. But Sprint’s new text service allows users to log in to its web site and receive and send text messages in a setup akin to a web-based email service. It can even store messages, leaving a copy even if they’re deleted from the phone, and it also gives users the ability to set up SMS blacklists and whitelists — the first I’ve heard of any carrier offering users such ability.
This is quite cool, and something it would great to see other operators offer. While one of the main benefits of SMS is obviously the near-ubiquitous coverage offered by mobile devices, this shows how it can be adapted to better fit a users’ context, and improve usability.
So this pares back my list of Things My Phone Should Do a bit — feel free to leave your own suggestions along these lines in the comments, or drop me an email.
Update: File this entire post under “too good to be true”: The Mac address book thing doesn’t work over Bluetooth, and the Sprint web app is pretty flaky — it only seems to currently allow you to send messages to other Sprint phones, while I can’t seem to get it to show any incoming messages, and there’s no documentation or support I can find online. So it’s dream deferred…
[tags]mobile, mobile messaging, sms, sprint[/tags]
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