Customers of Qtel Group companies in six different markets can now use the Gmail SMS Chat service, thanks to the strategic relationship between Google and the Qtel Group.

With strong demand for the service in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia – where ownership of smartphones is much higher than the proportion of customers with Broadband data access, companies in the Qtel Group have rolled the service out to Indonesia, Tunisia, Maldives, Algeria, Palestine and Kuwait.
 
For Qtel Group customers, the service is free of charge and requires no subscription. Chat messages sent from their mobile phones to the Gmail account are billed at normal SMS rates. The Gmail SMS service works with any phone capable of SMS and is compatible with all operating systems, including Symbian, Android and Blackberry. 

The Gmail SMS Chat service gives Gmail users a quota of SMSs that they can send to another mobile customer. As this quota is used, an additional five SMS messages are added each time a Qtel Group customer replies to the initial SMS. It also enables Gmail users to add Qtel Group mobile customers - even if they do not have a Gmail account - to their address book and initiate real-time chat sessions with them, extending their community of friends, said a statement.

Qtel Group and Google first launched this service with Wataniya Mobile Palestine in August 2010 where it was a great success. During the first six months more than 310,000 messages were sent by this service.

How it works
Google SMS Chat enables interaction between a Google email user and a mobile phone user.  If you have a Gmail account, all you have to do is to send a message via SMS chat from your Gmail email account on the web to a Qtel Group company customer. The customer will receive the message via SMS instantly and he can respond by just replying to the message, the statement said. - TradeArabia News Service