These are the greatest news I’ve heard for a while - Google Calendar expanded their SMS support for providers outside of USA. Particularly, Cyprus Telecommunication Authority (CYTA) is now in the list of supported providers.
I have configured and verified my mobile phone, and it seems that notifications and reminders work just fine. The only problem so far is creating events via SMS messages, and requesting schedule information, like next event and daily agenda. This is most probably due to the shortcut number that Googles uses. Hopefully this will be fixed soon too. But even if it won’t - free SMS notifications for Google Calendar is something I’ve been waiting for.
As usual, you can have more infomration about SMS interface to Google Calendar check.
11 responses so far ↓
1
jujav4ik
// Sep 27, 2006 at 2:51 pm
It sounds great, now you can
annoynotify the users of Cyprus-Scout2
Alexey
// Sep 27, 2006 at 6:37 pm
Yeah, I’ve actually discovered recently that it now works for UK too. However it looks like they use premium SMS i.e. charge you for receiving the notification.
I found google calendar also a bit buggy - try copying a recurring event from one calendar to another for example - it will only copy one instance. Also, recurrence info sometimes is not saved.
3
Leonid Mamchenkov
// Sep 27, 2006 at 9:57 pm
for the moment it won’t work, as SMS notifications are supported only for the primary calendar. Maybe they’ll allow other calendars’ SMS reminders in the future.
4
Leonid Mamchenkov
// Sep 27, 2006 at 9:59 pm
According to this post in Help Center, Google is not charging anything for SMS messages. It’s your provider who does.
Regarding bugs in the Google Calendar - well, I saw a couple of minor issues myself. But I’ve seen this or that in any other web calendar application. Choose the one that suits you better, and send bug reports to fix the rest.
5
Sergey Kuleshov
// Sep 27, 2006 at 11:51 pm
wow, that’s a great news
6
michael
// Sep 28, 2006 at 10:22 am
Sounds interesting. It’s time to move all notifications from mobile phone to the Google Calendar
7
Alexey
// Sep 28, 2006 at 11:44 am
“standard rate for receiving text messages may apply”… come on, there is no such thing as “standard rate for receiving text messages” - incoming messages have always been free! It’s a premium MT SMS they are using. At my times there was not such a think as premium MT SMS in Cyprus - it is a way of charging a customer by sending an SMS to them.
8
Leonid Mamchenkov
// Sep 28, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Not everywhere, by far! You’ve just been lucky enough to always have it for free.
9
Alexey
// Sep 29, 2006 at 3:59 pm
I was talking about UK where it is free.
10
Leonid Mamchenkov
// Sep 29, 2006 at 4:06 pm
I haven’t heard anyone else mentioning it… Maybe you should ask your SMS operator to check what’s happening.
11 Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov » Things that I love about Google Calendar // Nov 23, 2006 at 1:00 pm
[...] SMS reminders. I am one of those people who need a reminder for practically everything that needs to be done. Google Calendar is about the only web service at this time which supports non-USA mobile numbers. SMS reminders mean that I have to duplicate and synchronize that much less data. [...]
Leave a Comment