After finding out that British Telecom has a service that allows landlines to receive text messages, I decided to see what happened when I sent a text message to my home phone. Surprisingly, I got an instant reply from SprintPCS telling me that for a limited time I could use their brand new text-to-landline service at standard messaging rates. Five seconds later, my phone rang and I got my message read to me by one of those creepy computerized text-to-speech voices that was pretty close to being understandable. The landline recipient then has the option to leave you a voice message or a pre-typed text message, which at the moment consists of only a few standard canned responses like "yes", "no", or "where are you?".

Text messaging is only starting to get really popular in the US, and it's clear to me when I see friends who have dozens of my unread texts on their phones because they don't know what they are. Unfortunately, there is no service yet that allows you to send a text-to-voice message to a text capable phone with a text-incapable user. I'm excited, though, that I'll be able to send texts to people like my mother, who refuse to do anything on a phone except...talk.

Sprint PCS users can send texts to landlines at standard text prices until October 12th, 2005, after which they will probably charge a per-call or subscription fee.