How to Turn Your Dumbphone Into a Smartphone Using Nothing But SMS

By Whitson Gordon

The smartphone revolution may be in full swing, but there are still a lot of you out there rocking a basic, inexpensive phone that doesn't have any "smart" features—or so you've been told. If you want to get email, Facebook, driving directions, and other web features on your phone, you can cheat a little bit and get them through SMS messages. Here's how.

Image remixed from an original by Jezper/Shutterstock.

Note that you'll probably want an unlimited text messaging plan if you're going to use these often. While none of these tricks will incur any extra charges, you will be charged for each text message sent and received, which can pile up pretty quickly. For just a few bucks a month, you can get an unlimited plan that will let you search the web, send email, and check Facebook and Twitter as much as you want.

Search the Web with Google

Update: It seems that Google's SMS search service is currently down. It was working yesterday, but as of right now all searches are returning empty results (great timing, Google). Hopefully it will be back up soon, and we'll update this post when it is.

When you're out and about and you need quick info—whether it's the weather forecast, word definitions, unit conversions, or language translations, you can get just about any information you need from Google's SMS Search. Just like Google on the web, it can often detect what you're looking for and give you a straight answer right then and there. Just text your query to 466453 (GOOGLE) and they'll text you back the results. Here are some of the things you can search for:

Get Movie Times: Just search for movies in a city (e.g. movies los angeles ca to see showtimes for all the movies in your area. You can also search a specific zip code if you prefer.
Restaurants and Other Businesses: Similarly, you can search for local places in a certain city with something like burgers 90028 or Home Depot Los Angeles.
Word Definitions: Search for these just like you would on Google with the define operator, e.g. define defenestrate. You can shorten this to just d, e.g. d defenestrate.
Translations: to use Google Translate from your non-smartphone, just use the translate operator. For example: translate hello to french.
Unit Conversions: You don't even need an operator for this one. Just type in your conversion, like 1 us pint in liters to get an answer.

To get help with any command, just type help and the operator in question, e.g. help definitions. For the full list of operators you can use (and an emulator that will let you test it out), check out Google's SMS Search page.

So, you probably know a lot of these. However, Google has one more operator that makes open-ended searches very easy: the web operator. Just type web and then your search terms to search for just about anything. Can't remember which one was Anne Frank and which one was Hellen Keller? Look one of them up with web anne frank. Want to know the difference between apple cider and apple juice? You can even search web difference between apple cider and apple juice and you'll be able to settle that debate with ease.

Note that any links it gives you will lead you to a mobile browser, where you will incur data charges. Usually, you'll be able to at least get some information from the text message—like that for the most part, apple cider and apple juice are the same. Were you to read the full article, you'd get more detailed information (like that some states define cider as unfiltered apple juice with "pulp" in it), but for searches with short answers, you can get everything you need with a quick text.

Get Driving Directions

If you've freed yourself of a GPS dependency, you're probably pretty used to getting driving directions before you leave the house. If you get lost, though, you can always get instant directions from Google via SMS. Just text directions and your starting and ending addresses to 466453, like so:

directions 123 maple st pasadena ca to 321 main st los angeles ca

It will send you a series of texts afterwards (seriously, it'll be quite a few messages) detailing the entire route for you, so you won't get lost.

Send and Receive Email via Gmail

Our favorite way to use email on our non-smartphones is the webapp-supercharging ifttt service. By choosing Gmail as your first step and SMS as your second step, you can create a task that sends you a text message whenever you get a new email from a specific person, or with a certain label.

What's also really nice about this method is that you choose how the text message is formatted. So, if you don't want to see the message's label, you can remove that from the message, and if you do want to see the beginning of the email's body, you can add that to the SMS from the ifttt interface.

You can also send messages with ifttt, though it isn't quite as simple. Basically, you create a task that sends an email to someone when you send ifttt an SMS message with a specific tag. So, for example, I could make a task that, when I text ifttt a message with the tag #emailadam, it will send that message to my friend Adam's email address (via my Gmail address). You'd have to create a separate task for each person you might want to email, so you won't be able to reply to any email you get, but it can be very handy when you need to send a quick message to someone.

Update and View Your Calendar

If you use Google Calendar, you can use Google's built-in SMS service to view events, and ifttt to add new events. All you need to do is make sure your Calendar is linked to your phone number in Google Calendar under Settings > Mobile Setup. Then, to see your events, you can send any of the following messages to 48368 (GVENT):

NEXT: Will reply to you with your next scheduled event.
DAY: Will reply to you with your schedule for the current day.
NDAY: Will reply to you with your schedule for tomorrow.
STOP: Will opt out of the Google Calendar SMS service.

To add new events, we like to use ifttt. Make your first action a tagged SMS message with whatever tag you want (something like #cal should work). For your second action, choose the Quick Add Event from Google Calendar. Whatever you type in that box will be the message it uses for Google Calendar's Quick Add feature (which you can test on the Google Calendar page, if you're not familiar with how it works). Using {{Message}} as your Quick Add Text should be sufficient, so hit Create Action when you're done.

Then, to add a new event, just send an SMS message to ifttt with your event info and the #cal tag. You want the event info to be formatted in a way Google Calendar's Quick Add understands, e.g. Dinner with Adam at 6pm at Din Tai Fung. Google calendar will parse out the location (Din Tai Fung) and time (6pm) and add it as a new event. If you're unfamiliar with Google Calendar's Quick Add feature, head to Google Calendar's main page and click "Quick Add" in the upper left hand corner to see how it works.

Note that you can also use GVENT to add new events to Google Calendar: just send GVENT a message with your Quick Add text and it'll go into your default calendar. What's nice about using ifttt is that you can create multiple tags, each for a different calendar—like #personalcal, #workcal, and so on—and then send events to whatever calendar you want on-the-go.

Update and View Your Social Networks

Depending on what social networks you use, you have a few choices in linking them to SMS on your phone. Most have SMS features built-in, but you can also use ifttt for some things if you want more control. Here are a few examples.

Facebook

To turn on SMS support for Facebook, head to Facebook's Mobile Settings and register your phone with Facebook. Once you've done so, you can edit a few different things:

Notifications: This lets Facebook send you SMS notifications when someone comments on your status, posts on your wall, adds you as a friend, or anything else (you can further refine these settings under Facebook's Notification settings, if you only want messages for specific types of notifications). You can also set specific times of day for Facebook to stay silent, and tell it to stop sending you messages if you're using Facebook at the time.
Messages: You can get SMS notifications when someone messages you on Facebook, or choose to have Facebook only send notifications when someone specifically messages your phone from Facebook.
Daily Text Limit: If you aren't on an unlimited plan, obviously this can eat up a lot of money. Here, you can tell Facebook to limit the number of text messages you receive a day, so you don't go over budget on your phone bill.

To update your status from your phone, just send your status updates to 32665 (FBOOK), and it will post them on your profile.

Alternatively, you can create a new task in ifttt that, whenever you send a tagged SMS to ifttt, sends that to Facebook as a new status. The main advantage of using ifttt instead of Facebook's official method is that you can manage it from the same page as your Gmail, Calendar, and other ifttt tasks. However, using Facebook's official route is easier since you can add it as a separate contact, rather than having to remember a tag.

Twitter

To set up Twitter on your phone, just head to Twitter's Mobile Settings page and register your number with them. Once you do, you can manage your notifications from that page—that is, choose whether you get notifications for tweets from certain users, direct messages, and mentions, among other events. Like Facebook, you can also tell Twitter to stop sending you messages at certain hours of the day.

To send tweets or perform other actions from your phone, just text 40404 one of the following commands:

Texting 40404 without a command will tweet whatever message you send.
Follow: Sending this followed by a username (e.g. follow WhitsonGordon will follow that user on Twitter.
Unfollow: Sending this followed by a username (e.g. unfollow WhitsonGordon will unfollow that user on Twitter.
On/Off: Turn all Twitter notifications on or off. If you follow the command with a username (e.g. on WhitsonGordon) will turn mobile notifications on or off for a specific user.
Get: Followed by a username, this will show you the latest tweet from any given user.
Retweet: Followed by a username, this will retweet a specific user's last tweet.
Favorite: Followed by a username, this will favorite a specific user's last tweet.
DM: Followed by a username and a message, this will send that message to a specific user as a private direct message.

If you use multiple social networks, there's no need to text your statuses to both Facebook and Twitter, either. Remember that with a combination of services, you can post to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all at the same time if you so desire.

Putting It All Together

Now, while you could use Google and ifttt for pretty much everything, we recommend using official services whenever you can. That way, you can add each individual number as a contact in your phone—like 40404 for Twitter—and just send SMS messages to those contacts whenever you need to do something.

The only hard part, of course, is remember all of the above commands. When you're on the go, you may forget if you need an operator to do unit conversions, or what the operator is for getting the latest tweet from a certain user. I've found the easiest way to remember these is to copy the above information into the "Notes" or "Comments" section on each contact—Google, Facebook, Twitter, ifttt, and whoever else. That way, when you need to do something, you can just look up the contact and find everything you need to know right there.

This obviously isn't quite as easy to use as a smartphone might be, but it's pretty shocking how much you can do with a few well-crafted text messages. Don't forget that you can get even more out of your non-smartphone with Google Voice, and if you're willing to pay for a smartphone, you can always use a smartphone without a data plan too (after all, Wi-Fi is everywhere these days). Got any other tricks or services that work over SMS? Share your favorites with us in the comments below.