GMail’s really blitzing new features out at the moment – yesterday it became an OpenID provider, and earlier in the week they rolled out gadgets for Calendar and Docs, but today’s new feature is SMS.

If you’ve got phone numbers stored with your contacts then if they go offline when you’re talking to them, your messages will be sent as SMS instead. Best of all, it’ll give the person you SMS a number that they can email in the future to get messages to your GMail account.

The functionality hasn’t arrived over this side of the pond yet, but it’s a lovely little bonus feature, so I hope it shows up soon. It’s yet another reason why you should use GMail over Yahoo or Hotmail.

GMail (via GoogleWatch)