My Treo rocks. Part of my love for the new gadget is how I can now AIM on the run without SMS. Sure, I risk frostbitten fingers as I walk across campus and I’d probably be a lot better off if I just called the person, but…but…

Anyway, Everything Treo was near the top of my Google query with a roundup of three commercial IM apps for Palm. But none of the reviewed apps seemed all that great, and I sort of expected to find a free client. The Treonauts review wasn’t much help either, and I was about to give up when I found Atomig Cog’s Toccer, a completely free, still-in-beta AIM client. It’s plenty capable and seems to be in active development (five releases since mid-August).

A couple features I didn’t think about before I started looking include directly connecting to AOL (some clients use a proxy), background receiving (because fully-synchronus IMing is frustrating), and support for the five-way nav clicker.

palm, treo, IM, AIM, communication, mobile phones, cellphones, instant messaging, AIM client, mobile communications, chat

My friend Will was in meetings all day Friday, and there are few better times to have SMS messaging than in meetings. Thing is, I didn’t want to type on my phone’s numeric keypad when I had my computer in front of me, so I went looking for the details of this old hint that describes how to send SMS messages with iChat (would also work with any AIM client).

But there are other solutions. Slipstick lists the email addresses for various networks’ email to SMS gateways. And, obviously, most networks have web forms to send SMSs. Here’s Verizon’s.

This leads to a few questions. In these days of number portability, how can a person identify the carrier for a particular phone number based on the number alone? Will these web and email to SMS gateways work for off-network numbers (i.e. will Nextel’s gateway send SMS to Sprint?)? Is there another network agnostic gateway besides the AIM service identified above?

About the picture: there are a number of entertaining sms-tagged photos on Flickr.

tags: aim client, aim to sms, email to sms, ichat, mobile text, send sms messages, sms, sms gateway, sms gateways, sms messaging, texting, web to sms