Tutorial: How to send & receive SMS on your PC.

What a better day than Sunday to write a tutorial and I have the feeling that you are going to like it. It is about sending & receiving text messages, the oldest modern means of communicating with friends and family since the first mobile phone came to market.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to send/receive SMS right on your desktop so you can put that phone aside while doing your work and still interact with the outside world. Consider yourself lucky to be living in a world where there's an app for everything. For this tutorial, we will need Pushbullet app for Android and Pushbullet extension for Chrome on your computer. Both are available free in the Play store and Chrome store. Once you have these setup on your phone and computer, you're pretty much done.

Pushbullet will actually send/receive SMS via your Android phone and will display your phone number. You recipients won't even know you're actually using a computer to chat with them. As you can see in the snapshot above, click the Pushbullet extension, then the SMS tab. The latter will automatically list your Android phone(s) in the first field.

The second field is where you type a phone number or select a name from your address book. Pushbullet is a smart app and includes a auto-complete feature. If you're concerned about privacy, you can disable the auto-complete feature in the settings of Pushbullet on your phone. Start typing and it will filter your contact list. A very convenient feature. Finally, type your message and click send. One thing to remember though, you are still limited to the 160 characters, exceeding that "historical" limit will split your messages.

When you receive a SMS, it will pop up like any Pushbullet notification in the bottom right corner of your computer. You will get to read, dismiss or reply to the message. Click Reply and the window in the screen shot below will pop up. 

It is that easy to send and receive SMS on your computer, thanks to Pushbullet. The extension works on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebooks. If you have suggestions, comments, join the Pushbullet subreddit. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial :-)