Receive events notifications to your mobile phone for FREE
In my opinion one of the overlooked features in Google Calendar is the ability to receive notifications about upcoming events to your mobile phone by SMS. And all this – for FREE (well it depends on your carrier. My carrier does not charge me for received messages – only for those that I send).
The following is a detailed explanation of how to start using it right now. It will work for Google Apps users as well.
How to set it up
Navigate to your Google Calendar (http://www.google.com/calendar).
- Click on the Settings menu item at the right top corner of the page.
- Click on the Mobile Setup option
- Specify correct values for Country and Phone number (including country + area code)
- Click on the Send Verification Code button
- Check your phone for new incoming SMS messages (for me it took less than 5 seconds)
- The received code put at the field named Verification code
- Click on the Finish setup button
That’s it. You can use this feature right now.
Example
Let’s try something out. Create an new event (click on Create event menu item on the left). Give it some title, set its start time to occur in about 4 minutes and look at the Options section. There you can add several reminders for this event – Email, Pop-up, SMS. Choose SMS option for first reminder and set it to one minute. Click on the Save button. In about 2-3 minutes you will get a notification about this event.
Make it default
For each calendar you can specify its notification preferences. For instance, you night want to receive SMS reminders for each newly added event. To do this, click on the Settings – Calendars.
You will see a list of your calendars (My calendars section). For each one you have a link-like button named Notifications. Click on it. You will be presented will the following page:
In this page you can set up your default reminders. You can have more than one (Email/SMS).
I find this feature very useful. It’s very handy that you can get SMS alerts about your upcoming events when you do not have access to your calendar.
I hope you will find it useful as well.
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