The Internet Connection

By Michael Sauers
Google SMS (Simple Messaging Service)
I love my Treo 600. For those of you not familiar with this device it's a cell phone, PalmPilot, digital camera, MP3 player and Internet terminal all in one. I use all of its features daily, but find the Internet access particularly useful when I'm out and about and need to look something up.

I've used this gadget to find word definitions, restaurant locations and even checked to see if Amazon.com has a book for less than the local Barnes & Noble. All of this is wonderful for me, someone who has 'Net access on his cell phone. But what about those of you who don't have this level of connectivity? Well, if you have text messaging (SMS; Simple Messaging Service) on your cell phone, Google has come to your rescue.

Getting this to work is simple. Just send a text message to 46645 (GOOGL on standard cell phones) with the terms of your search. Below are three examples of Google SMS searches. The first is requesting a book's price via its ISBN. The second is looking up someone's address and phone number. The third is requesting a definition.

In the third example, I actually received two messages from Google since the complete definition of the word was longer than the maximum 160 characters allowed in a SMS message.

More details on how Google SMS works and additional examples can be found at www.google.com/sms/.

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February 27, 2008
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