Almost every Web 2.0 service now has some sort of SMS flavor incorporated in them. And Gmail isn’t far behind the rest of pack.

SMS communication was already possible through a number of social networks including Twitter and Facebook. You can even send SMS from Yahoo! Mail or Windows Live Messenger. Now Google has also come up with its own SMS utility, that lets you send email as an SMS.

The new Gmail Labs feature scheduled to be released soon would allow you to send messages as texts if your friends are not on their computers. They can even reply back to you via the SMS carrier but its unclear at the moment if it would involve sending SMS to international numbers.

The feature was released and then subsequently pulled out due to some bugs that were discovered latter. The Gmail team promises to re-release the labs project within two weeks after the bugs have been resolved. It is safe to assume that it would be one of the most anticipated lab features of all time, because there are a lot text fanatics out there including me. I usually send 4000 to 5000 SMS per month, but if this process involves sending messages with international SMS rates then I would like to pass. It would be a lot cheaper to just get your email pushed to you on your handset with standard packet data services.

But today’s highlight is the all new Voice and Video chat capabilities that Google added to its popular web mail application. The official Gmail blog announced today that it has added the new features which would be instantly available to everyone. All that you need is a plugin which could be installed from within Gmail.

The Gmail team preferred to have interoperability in their new service, that’s why they developed this technology on popular web protocols like the XMPP and the legacy RTP. The videos are encoded with H.264, which mean some old computers may have problems decoding and running a smooth stream. Nevertheless, if you are on an Intel Pentium 4 or higher, then there is nothing to worry about.

You can view the videos in the small fly-out panel or pop-em out to a large PIP view. You can even blow them up to full screen and have a smooth chatting experience at the same time. The plug-in developers were nice enough to make a tutorial video for us, highlighting some of the features of this new service along with instructions on how to use them. You can find the video on the official Google Channel on YouTube.

Voice and Video Plugin Direct Download

As the root of our name implies, desktop browsers aren’t really our thing in Engadget-land. Still, we’re pretty sure that you’ve managed to learn about Google’s new Chrome browser even without our assistance. However, when we hear Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin discussing Chrome on Android, well, we’re all in. Even though neither has been released out of beta yet, Brin said that the Webkit-based Chrome browser is expected to soon supplant the Webkit-based browser in Android. “Probably a subsequent version of Android is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack,” Brin said before adding, “My guess is we’ll have ‘Chrome-like’ or something similar,” when asked about the brand name. While we have lingering doubts about the likely stability of the initial 1.0 Android OS release, version 2.0 with Chrome is likely to be killer in every sense of the word to Symbian Nokia, Microsoft, and Apple. Of course, we’ll be first in line for the HTC Dream regardless.

Google this weekend accidentaly leaked details — via an online comic book — on its upcoming cross-platform open-source browser: Google Chrome — which it claims will deliver a streamlined and improved interface along with performance improvements and security enhancements; the new browser is based on both Apple’s Webkit, the core of the Safari browser, and Firefox, the rapidly growing alternative browser, but will square off against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which dominates the internet, but continues to play catch up with security flaws and compatibility. The beta version of Google Chrome, only for for PCs initially, is expected to ship on Tuesday in more than 100 countries, while Mac and Linux versions are in development.

“On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web,” the company wrote in its blog. “Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.”

The company claims that it separates each tab or visited website in its own “sandbox,” a private secure environment that keeps information from other sites: it not only protects privacy, but also offers better stability and performance, the search giant claimed. The user interface will allow a tab to be created “incognito,” a privacy mode that will not log any of the activity onto the computer, cookies are wiped out and history is not saved when it is closed.

The company will “sandbox” plugins into their own process and also focus on improving JavaScript, which is used to build and deploy a variety of advanced features on. Google plans on using a separate JavaScript virtual machine that generates machine code, directly using the capabilities of the CPU for optimal performance.

Another benefit of sandboxing, according to the comic, is that the rights for each process are reduced, not allowing malware to install itself on a computer or affect what is happening in another tab. According to the engineers, the processes “can compute but they can’t write files to your hard drive or read files from sensitive areas like your documents or desktop.” The user must give explicit permission for high level access.

“We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers,” Google said.

Google’s comic pointed out that current browsers can be affected by fragmented memory, pushing the browser closer to a crash as the user opens new tabs and closes old tabs, even though they might only have a few open at one time. Without the ability to separate the processes, if one thing goes wrong, the whole browser is liable to crash. Chrome’s multi-process approach will allow each tab to run individual independent processes- if one tab fails, the browser recognizes the problem, ends the process in that tab, but the others retain function.

Even within one tab, when the user switches from site to site, Chrome will completely switch the process and reclaim the memory. If a slow-down occurs, a task manager can be opened to see exactly what pages or even what plugins are hogging memory, CPU power, or bandwidth.

Google also hoped that its efforts will begin to address the lingering performance and compatibility issues that face a wide variety of cross-platform browsers by using an automatic testing — an internet “bot” — to check and test millions of the most popular pages each week (based on Google PageRank).

During the testing thus far, Google has used Webkit to run page layout tests. When the project began it was only passing 23 percent of the tests. “Moving from there to 99 percent has been a fun challenge and an interesting example of test-driven design” said Pam Greene, one of the project software engineers.

The choice of Apple’s Webkit was no coincidence. Google claimed they were attracted to the speed potential. When the Chrome team consulted the Android engineers and asked them why they chose Webkit, they responded “it uses memory efficiently, was easily adapted to embedded devices, and it was easy for new browser developers to learn to make the code base work.”

Much like Apple did with Safari on the iPhone, Google will use Chrome as part of its Android mobile platform and hopes that its use of Google Gears, a plug-in that extends the standard browser experience, will help developers deliver native-app like performance over the Web with cross-platform compatibility.

Android’s gaining a head of steam as it heads towards release — Google just posted up some details on the upstart OS’s app distribution system, Android Market. Just like Apple’s iPhone App Store, Android Market will run on Android phones like the HTC Dream and allow users to browse and install apps, as well as comment on and rate apps they’ve already purchased. (Somewhat terrifyingly, Google describes the rating and comment-system as “similar to YouTube,” but we’re hoping the reference is to user-generated ratings in general and not the grammar and language catastrophe that is YouTube comments.) Unlike Apple’s store, however, Android Market will be open to all — Google wants devs to “have an open and unobstructed environment” for their apps, and it’ll only take three steps (register, upload, describe) to put content on the service. The first Android handsets will come with a beta version of Market that supports free downloads only, but a version that has app sales, versioning, and other features will arrive soon after launch — given the number of mediocre apps that have somehow passed Apple’s vetting process, it’ll be interesting to see what shows up in Google’s store with no filters at all. More screenshots after the break.

[Via Mobile Burn]

It looks like Verizon isn’t taking those 700MHz spectrum open access rules very seriously, and a certain competing bidder isn’t real happy. In a petition filed with the FCC by Google, the company alleges that Verizon is willfully ignoring the “plain meaning of the [open access] rule” by suggesting it will allow one type of access for users who use Verizon-approved devices, and another for those using third-party units. According to the document, “Verizon’s position would completely reverse the meaning of the rule such that the open access condition would apply to none of Verizon’s customers, and thereby render the condition a nullity.” The search giant is calling for the FCC to block Verizon’s $4.7 billion bid on the spectrum unless the company agrees to comply with the previously-decided open access rules. Since this isn’t the first inkling we’ve had that Verizon wasn’t down with open access, we’re not surprised, but it looks like Google has a little more fight left in them — and that could make all the difference. [Warning: PDF read link]

[Via IP Democracy; Thanks, Bram]

The interesting news is that now you can use Google itself as a Whois Lookup tool. According to Googlified, this service was already launched by Google back in 2004 but was taken off after 2 weeks of its release. This time Google has partnered with DomainTools to provide the Whois records instead of abusively querying the network solutions’ Whois database itself.

To use the Whois Lookup service provided by Google, just go to Google and type in “whois yourdomain.com” to get creation and expiry dates of the domain. Click on the link to get detailed information about the domain on DomainTools.

Also don’t forget to checkout how to use Google as a currency converter or to get real-time cricket scores and clock updates.

[Thanks, Scott]

Keeping in mind our love and attachment to Google Adsense, the Adsense team is giving us a chance to get free Google Adsense Stickers. These stickers are designed for laptops, but they’ll work just as well for placement on mugs, skateboards, or temporarily on a shirt.

Getting one of these cool and sticky Google Adsense stickers is easy. Just send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Google Adsense with enough postage to return 1 oz of sticker goodness to you. Send it to the following postal address:

Google AdSense
c/o Arlene Lee
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA

The sad part is that every publisher gets a maximum of one or two stickers