how to turn any phone into a PDA using your texting plan

OK, so I have spent the last week in the hospital with my son. This means I have to spend some time away from my computer, but I wanted to be able to update www.milowilson.blogspot.com www.thewilsonheart.com www.twitter.com/milowilson and www.twitter.com/thewilsonheart with my phone.

Enter text to emailing capabilities. These instructions will be for Verizon wireless users.
Every Verizon customer has an email address associated with their texting plan. For every number you have an email address: your-10-digitnumber@vtext.com This is your texting email address. Also, your account associates a picture messaging account built the same way: your-10-digit-number@vzwpix.com Any email address in the world can send a message to you by using one of these addresses. Again, the only charge here is for a texting plan, which in my case is unlimited.

Now, I have a gmail account, which includes a free email forwarding service. So, in my settings, I tell gmail to forward my emails to my10digitphonenumber@vzwpix.com (I have found that the vzwpix email address works better than the vtext. I think it has to do with the size of the files going through their server) Once this is completed, all of your emails should get forwarded to your phone. (Still no data plan, just a texting plan)

From here, I can type email addresses into the "send" field on a text message rather than just phone numbers. The recipient will receive the email from my10digitphonenumber@vzwpix.com so I generally start an email by reminding the recipient of who I am.

Then, I set all my blogs to have the option to post via email. In blogger, this is an easy tab to find on the dashboard under the settings. This is also handy, because I can post to my blogs fro any email address anywhere, as long as I know the keyword to do so. this is done by emailing myusername.mysecretkeyword@blogger.com and the posts immediately appears, whether it is a video, or picture, or a text file.

Similarly, I set up my twitter accounts to post via www.twittermail.com Why? Twitter only allows each phone to post to one twitter account. In this case I want to have two twitter accounts. So, by using mysecretkeyword@twittermail.com I can send tweets to multiple accounts. and, by the way my twitter feed then gets forwarded on to my Facebook updates...

One final thing my wife Erin figured out this week... If you want to send emails to people over 160 characters, tell your phone that you want to send a picture message, but just don't attach the picture. For some reason, picture messages are allowed up to 1000 characters, to the much smaller 160 characters in a standard text message.

OK, are you confused yet? Interested in learning more? I will try to answer your questions, but again I am using a Verizon phone, gmail, blogger, facebook, and twitter. While some of these things should transfer to other phone companies or social networks, I can't be sure until you have tried it.

Good Luck!