The New Hampshire House is considering a ban on texting while Driving. Please, no.

Old instructions that connect the Mac OS X Address Book app to a phone via Bluetooth from O’Reilly and SillyDog. Once paired, the Address Book can initiate dialing, notify the user of incoming calls, and send SMS texts.

Bluetooth Texter SMS Widget, message2net, and BluePhoneElite all offer further tools to interact with your Bluetooth-connected mobile phone. The list of compatible phones (BPE & m2n) offers some leads for those trying to make the connection.

Finally, Simon Winter offers some tips on interacting with SMS via AppleScript.

bluetooth, mac, mac os x, sms, texting, applescript, cell phone

College sports are big business, so recruiting student athletes is big business. The NCAA limits the times coaches and recruiters can call or visit athletes, but text messages are all fair game. For now.

The Chronicle of Higher Education explained in an October 2006 story:

Before Chandler Parsons committed to play basketball for the University of Florida, his cellphone buzzed more than 100 times a day with text messages from college coaches.

The attention flattered the 6-foot-9 high-school senior from Winter Park, Fla. His cellular plan included unlimited text messages, so the onslaught did not run up his bill. And in some cases, the quick exchanges helped him get to know prospective coaches.

But the novelty soon wore off. “All these different coaches would text me saying the same thing,” he says, like “Hey, great game,” or “Look forward to hearing from you soon.” To make room for new messages, he had to empty his inbox twice a day. “It got a little crazy,” he says.

Now, the NCAA has proposed a ban on text messaging and is set to vote on the measure today.

Whatever the vote, it’s clear coaches had not only tapped into a loophole in NCAA rules, they’re following the trend in communications. A 2004 study in South Korea revealed a preference for texting over emailing, with two-thirds of students saying they rarely email, but SMS messages were up 40% year over year. A July 2005 Pew Internet Study found US teens preferring texting (via IM and SMS) over email — “email is increasingly seen as a tool for communicating with ‘adults.’”

sms, texting, ncaa, recruiting, ban, text messaging, text messages, college sports, communication, student athletes

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