It’s no secret if you own an iPhone!
You can’t get unlimited text messaging with your data plan. Not to mention you now have to pay $30 per month for the data plan, which wasn’t the case when I purchase my first generation iPhone 2 years ago.
So if you do a lot of texting on your iPhone, your bill can go through the roof!
Let’s welcome Google Talk for the iPhone.
Here’s all the amazing features of Google Talk for your iPhone:
- Contact list view just like in your gmail on your desktop
- status notification letting you know who’s online
- status customization so you can set your own status
- currently typing notification to know when people are typing
- saved chats you can search/retrieve on your computer
- “off the record” so you can chat without data being save
- status update to “unavailable” if you navigate away from Talk
So do you think AT&T is very happy about something like this?
Absolutely not!
Not when they are charging an additional $20 – $30 a month for text messaging and making literally billions of dollars in revenue.
Here’s how to get Google Talk for your iPhone:
1) Go to Google.com/m on your iPhone web browser and then sign in to your Gmail account
2) In the “mobile” view, you’ll see a “More” link with a down arrow next to it in the upper right hand corner of your screen.
3) Click “more” and you should see a drop down menu
4) Find “Talk” and click it
5) At the top of the screen, set your status accordingly
6) Click a contact that you want to chat with (they need to be online which is indicated by a green bubble)
7) to “Go Offline” > once your open a contact, you’ll see a down arrow in the upper right hand corner > click that and select “Go off the record”
And that’s it!
Since this is a web based application, not an actual iPhone App, you will be working directly in the Safari web browser.
I can imagine that in the not to distant future, we’ll see a Google Talk iPhone App which make it even easier, and more convenient to chat with your contacts.
Don’t see the person in your list that you want to chat with? Simply add them as a contact and invite to them chat in your Gmail.