Send SMS text messages with iChat

Did you know you can send SMS text messages to mobile phones using nothing but iChat? Well, you can, and it’s easy.

Simply login to iChat, and select New Chat from the File pull-down menu. Click the “+” sign under participants and enter “+1” and the phone number of the person you want to send the message to and click OK. Don’t use any spaces, or other characters (dash’s, dots, etc…).

That’s it. The message you type in the window will be sent to the phone. The person can even reply to your message, and their reply will show up in the same window… just like a chat session.

This works with iChat 3.0. I haven’t tested it with earlier versions.