US cell phones only right now. Obviously the tablet location is not restricted.

Frank

Seeing as how my tablet doesn't have a GSM nor CDMA radio in it, I don't see how I'd do this...

get an n800 wimax edition? Don't worry about the what ifs john. dkwatts thanks for the easy to follow summary. oh and I have had sucess w/ the following carriers.

at&t

sprint

verizon

Maybe when they actually make one :-)

From my experience with this service, you will not be able to just tell someone that number and they will be able to send sms to you, you have to initiate with them first by sending them an sms from your gtalk.

Since you have never sent me a gtalk sms message to my phone number, if I tried to sms you from my phone I would get a reply that there is no account at that number.

I also do not think there is any guarantee that that will always be YOUR sms number and that it may change at some point and/or be different between you and different parties, but not quite sure about that yet.

All that said, I find this service better than the AIM sms service I had been using.

Which, if true, makes it no better than what AIM does.

It is better in the sense that once you have established contact with someone, they can continue to use the same number.

Also, in that same established sense when someone sends sms to you and you are offline, it will be queued for you once you are online.

I think it is better than AIM in those two regards.

Also, the cruft that gets sent to your recipients is a few less characters with gtalk than what AIM sends

Are you sure about that? From what quipper8 said above, it doesn't sound like it's guaranteed that the number will be yours forever. Which means that, like AIM, you might only be able to use it for a little while, but it's not known exactly how long you can use it (I've seen the AIM number still work after a few days of inactivity). If that's the case, then it would seem to be equal between the two services.

The Google number at least looks like a real phone number, though. But I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing (someone might try to actually call it -- I wonder what sort of confusion that might cause).

Does that only work if you're using gmail? I know Google Talk will queue your messages in your Chats folder on gmail, if you're not online... but I don't know if you can get those without logging into Gmail.

I didn't, in my test, notice it being significantly less obnoxious.

so I don't see what the problem is. It works. To answer your question it does not require you to log into gmail for a convo to be brought up. I have had no problem with friends replying to me yet.