Palm Pre Touch Phone » text message

Attaching a file to an SMS/MMS message

Adam Marks — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:02:15 +0000

Attaching a photo or video to an SMS/MMS message is a fairly straight-forward task. You can either push a multimedia file to a new message from another app, such as directly from the Photo or Video app, or you can attach it directly from within a text message. The easiest way to do this is to tap the icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen to load up a photo selection screen, choose your desired folder and then photo, and tap the "Attach Photo" button. If you want to send a video, use the icons on the bottom of the screen to switch between photos and videos.

You will notice that once you start writing your message, the icon turns into a icon to send the message. If you want to attach a file after this, you don't need to first delete your text to get the icon back. Instead, just swipe-down from the top-left of the screen to bring down the Messaging application drop-down menu and select "Attach File" and follow the same steps as above.

Addressing an SMS to a word or number

Adam Marks — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:48:44 +0000

When you are sending a text message to a person in your contact list, you normally just search for that contact in the TO field on a new SMS message (or just use Universal Search). But what happens if you want to send a message to a number not in your contact list? Or what if you are given a name or word to send the message to, but don't have a phone dialpad in front of you to know what number each character refers to (e.g. 2 = ABC, 3 = DEF, etc). Luckily, webOS gives you the flexibility to address the message almost any way you want.

Dial by number: If you wanted to send a message to 123456789, you can just start typing the numbers of your keyboard without the need to press the Option (Orange/Silver) key beforehand. As you can see in the top of screenshot, typing "ertdfgcvb" (the 123456789 keys on the keyboard) gives you an option to "SEND TO NUMBER".
Dial by word: Many companies, however, will often tell you to send a text message to a word, which requires you to have a old-school telephone dialpad in front of you to know how to do that conversion. For example, Coca-cola's MyCokeRewards tells you to text a code to "COKE" (2653). Even though the dialpad isn't available in the Messaging App to refer to, all you need to do is just type the word in the "TO" field and the conversion is done in the "SHORT CODE" section. As you can see in the screenshot, the Short code for "ertdfgcvb" converts to 378334928.

Note that you can not mix-and-match these methods. So, if you want to send a text to 1-555-PALM-200, you will actually need to do the PALM-to-7256 conversion on your own.

Sharing specific Contact Details

Adam Marks — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:48:41 +0000

While webOS provides the ability to share the entirety of a single contact with others, what happens if you only want to share a phone number, email address or mailing address. For certain accounts (such as your Palm Profile or Google accounts), you can go into a Contract's entry, click "Edit", highlight the data you need and copy it, but this is clearly not the most efficient way you can do this, right? In fact, for "read only" accounts like Facebook, you are not even able to select or highlight some data in a contact record. Instead, keep reading after the break to learn how you can more quickly get access to share this information

Deleting text messages/IM conversations

Adam Marks — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 16:51:44 +0000

Deleting a text message or IM conversation in the messaging app is accomplished the same way as you would delete a multitude of things throughout webOS: by swiping the message off the screen. However, there are a couple of unique aspects of deleting from within of the Messaging App:

You can delete your entire messaging thread by swiping off a full conversation from the main top page of the Messaging App, but you can also delete individual messages from within a conversation.
As discussed on a prior tip, you do have the ability to send a single text message to multiple recipients at once. If you individually delete one of those messages from within a conversation, it will actually delete it in all of the conversation threads for each recipient. However, if you delete the message as part of an entire conversation, no other threads will be affected and that message will remain in those conversations until you delete it!
And don't forget that while you must press "Delete" to confirm after you swipe it off the screen, if you have multiple items to delete you do not need to confirm each deletion. Just swipe off the next item and the prior action will automatically be confirmed.

Adding/editing a contact

Adam Marks — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:16:28 +0000

Adding a new contact or adding to an existing contact is obviously an important function for a smartphone, and webOS gives you a lot of options to do just that. The following is a long--and probably not complete--list on how you can add a new contact or add to an existing contact. Continue reading after the break for all the details...

Send SMS/MMS to multiple contacts

Adam Marks — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:06:40 +0000

While you are only able to send a text message to a single recipient when initiating a new conversation via Universal Search or when responding to an existing conversation, there is a way to send a single message to multiple contacts at once. To initiate a multi-contact message, first you need to open up a new message by either pressing the new message icon on the bottom left corner of the Messaging App, selecting the "Share via MMS" option while viewing a photo, or by clicking any variation of "share via SMS" from within another app or while sharing an app link from the App Catalog. Then, in the "TO:" area at the top of the message just type to search for your first contact and when select the phone number you want to text, the recipient's name will appear. Then, just start typing again to search for the next contact and continue until you have everyone you need included. You can also automate this process by using apps such as LaunchPoint Speed Dial or Mail Lists, but due to webOS limitations you can only initiate any new message from within those apps

Note that while you can send a single message out to multiple contacts, the recipients don't see who else you sent that message to, nor can they reply back to everyone.

Share an application via Email or Text Message

Adam Marks — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:18:15 +0000

Do you have an application that you love and want to easily share with your friends? You can always go to PreCentral's App Catalog App Gallery and search for the app, copy the link location and send it as an email or text message, but there has to be a faster method, right? Indeed there is! All you need to do is:

Open up the App Catalog on your device
Find the specific app you want to share by either searching for it from the main page, or clicking on the Shopping Bag button on the bottom right to bring up a list installed apps
Once you have the App Description page loaded, click on the "Share" button and choose either "Email" or "Text Message"
This will open up either an email or text message with the direct link to the app for you to send to your friends

Identify a contact by a phone number

Adam Marks — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:03:27 +0000

One of the features from PalmOS that I often miss is the ability to tap on a phone number that is imbedded within an email or SMS (e.g. in a voicemail notification) to get a prompt identifying whose number that is prior to actually calling it. In webOS, if you tap on a phone number it automatically launches the phone app and dials that number. While this will indeed identify the number, it will also of course result in you calling that person. One option to determine the contact who owns that number is to type in or copy-and-paste the number into Universal Search, but that can be a pain. Keep reading after the break to learn of a much easier method you can use

Save a video from a text message

Adam Marks — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:47:18 +0000

Although webOS has a built-in mechanism to save a photo from a text message, saving a video is a little more complicated. In order to save a video, you need to either connect your phone to a computer and put it in USB mode, or use the Homebrew app Internalz to access the filesystem of your phone.

Save a photo from a text message / MMS

Adam Marks — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:45:23 +0000

Even though a photo that you receive via text message (MMS) gets embedded within the conversation, you are able to easily save that picture to your device. To copy that photo to your device, click on the thumbnail of the pic within the text message and a pop-up will appear. Click "View" to view the full size picture, and then click "Copy to Photos". That photo will now appear in the "Messaging" folder in the Photos app or when in USB mode.