OK this might be a bit of a silly question but does anybody know a way of making the N900 send a prewritten SMS at a given time without any user input?

That would be cool.

That can be done through an account with www.ipipi.com or www.jajah.com and no doubt through other messaging services.

With either of these services, you send the SMS from your browser, through the relevant website. It is likely to cost less than your mobile provider would charge, although there could be a data charge, depending on your data plan.

Both Ipipi and Jajah have low-bandwidth mobile sites, and you would probably reduce your SMS costs by using them for non-delayed messages. Unfortunately, the delayed-SMS options only seem to be available on their www sites. As previously mentioned, the resulting data cost might be negligible or might be significant, depending on your plan.

Jajah is mainly a telephony service with SMS availability. Ipipi has several messaging options such as converting SMS to email and vice versa.

If your friends are in the habit of using the "Reply" button when they receive SMS, you will have to find out whether this will work with these services. (I believe it won't work with Jajah. Ipipi has a number of options related to this, but the details are too long to get into here.)

i'm pretty sure it can be done from the command line with the dbus interface. you can setup a script to sleep for a certain time and then send an sms, or set up a crontab, or whatever.
of course this requires some command line skills.

a google search, maybe for something on the line of "dbus sms maemo", should turn up with the exact command to launch...

I found the relevant thread for anybody looking to the same. thanks everyone for the help.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...hlight=sms+CLI
BTW does anybody know if cron is available on the N900 yet?

Fcron is available.

Frank