There are lots of good reasons why someone might want to send a text message to you, or vice-versa, without actually having to use a cell phone.  Sometimes you're not near your phone, or your battery is dead, or you just feel like typing instead of pecking it out on the 10-key pad, etc.  Or how about the fact that if you send one from your phone to someone else's phone you both have to pay for a message?  Or maybe the user is overseas and it's just easier to use a different method than trying to figure out country codes, etc. 

In short, there are plenty of reasons why, so how about the "how"?  How do you send a text message without using your own phone?  There are actually a couple of very simple – and cost-effective – ways of doing it. 

The first is to send it by email.  Simple, fast and easy to do – if you know how.  There are two ways to accomplish this:

1. Address the email to the user at the appropriate address for the carrier that they're using.  For example:

Verizon – number@vtext.com
Cingular – number@mobile.cingular.com or number@cingularme.com
Sprint – number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile – number@TMoMail.net

2. Send the email to the phone number of the user followed by "@teleflip.com".  This is an excellent and easy method of sending it as the Teleflip service handles a lot of the details for you.  The major advantage, in my opinion, is that you don't need to know the carrier of the person to whom you're sending the message.  I mean, after all, unless it's going to a close friend or someone whose carrier you just happen to know coincidentally, not knowing the carrier is going to prevent you from sending the message.  

The disadvantage to sending the message from Teleflip is that there's no easy way for the recipient to reply to the message.  When you send the message using standard email directly to the carrier's address as shown in 1., above, any replies will be sent to the email address from which you sent your original email message to their phone.  They're both good methods if you just need to get a message to someone – if you're going to require a lot of back-and-forth, well, I'd just call them. 

The other method to send text messages without a cell phone is simply to go to the carrier's web site to send the message.  On virtually every carrier's main page you'll see a link saying "Sent a text" or "Send a message."  This is easy, free to send (although the recipient still pays for the received message, as they do with all of the messages they receive regardless of how they were sent) and pretty easy to find.  Again, though, the downside is that you've got to know which carrier your recipient is using. 

The antidote to this is to use a web site that will send a text message to anyone, anywhere, on any carrier without you having to know in advance which carrier your intended recipient is using.  One would think that this might be a difficult thing to accomplish, or somewhat hard to track down, but it couldn't be easier. 

There are so many sites that allow you to send text messages for free, in fact, that I'm going to recommend you to a site that is a directory of many of these other free sites.  It's called "FreeTextSMS" and is one of my favorites.  My absolute favorite, though, is called "TextForFree" because it offers an "auto-detect" function that allows you to simply enter your information and offers a cool list of abbreviations that you can use in your message.   The subject line is limited to about 10 characters, but that's a small price to pay for easy, unlimited and hassle-free texting.

Of course, there are ads on all of these sites – that's how they support themselves – but you can choose to ignore them quite easily if you like… there's no requirements, no registration and no cost on any of these sites.  I've tried them all and haven't found any of them spamming me, either, so that's not an issue.

For me, texting is pretty simple – the iPhone offers the virtual keyboard in the text messaging function that makes it pretty simple to tap out a message of any length or complexity – but it's not as simple for everyone else.  If you're constantly sending out messages and want to save your thumbs, keep your costs down and send to anyone regardless of what carrier they're using, try one of these sites.  I think you'll find it easier to use than trying to tap it all out using your thumbs on a phone's normal 10-key pad.