Google Inc on Wednesday extended their much popular free Gmail SMS service in India, now allowing users to chat free via SMSs.
The search engine giant rolled out the service in other countries sometime ago and India is the 52nd country to receive it. Google has established tie ups with major telecommunication service providers in the country to provide the best chatting platform for its users.
According to reports, the all new Gmail SMS service is available on service providers like Aircel, Idea, Loop Mobile, MTS, Reliance, Tata DoCoMo, Tata indicom and Vodafone. Google seemed to have missed Bharti Airtel Ltd and state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd to run the service.
Though users can send SMSs to mobile phones for free, Google has limited the number of SMSs that can be sent out from one Gmail address in order to keep a check on spamming and marketing SMSs.
The company has limited the SMS credit to 50 per day, and so for every message sent the credit goes down by one. If the user gets a reply from the other end the credit will increase by five. The users can also get the credit increased by sending SMSs to their own mobile phones. The SMS credit will increase every 24 hours.
"You can always send an SMS to your own phone, and then reply to that message multiple times. Every time you send a reply message, your SMS credit is increased by five. Effectively, you're buying more messages by paying your phone company for these outgoing messages," Google said.
