If you receive text messages while sitting in front of a personal computer, you might find it more convenient to reply to those messages using your PC rather than typing a reply on your phone. DeskSMS is an Android app currently in beta that redirects text messages sent to your phone, to your Gmail or Gtalk accounts, where you can then type a reply on your PC.
When a text message is sent to your Android phone that is running DeskSMS, the messages are forwarded to either your Gmail address or Gtalk account, though if you prefer, you can send them to both. After you receive the message on your PC you can type a reply that is sent via SMS to the person who sent you the original message. From what I can tell, the SMS reply is being sent from DesksSMS’ server and not via your phone, but the person receiving the message sees your phone number as the sender.
When you first run DeskSMS it asks for permission to log in to their app server using your Google account. The app server supports the push notifications that send the text messages from your phone to your Gmail address or Gtalk account. If you prefer, you can also install a Google Chrome or Firefox extension and have DeskSMS send text messages directly to Chrome or Firefox rather than Gmail or Gtalk.
If you are concerned about privacy, be aware that your text messages are flowing through DeskSMS’ servers, so if you don’t like the possibility of a third party possibly having access to your messages you shouldn’t use this app. The DeskSMS Android app includes features to store your text messages and call history on DeskSMS’ web servers where you can retrieve them, although you can still use the forwarding portion of DeskSMS if you opt to not store the messages.
In my brief testing of DeskSMS I did find that message delivery can be slow at times, which is not surprising given that the app is in beta. At this time there is no information about when a final version of DeskSMS will be released or whether they will be charging for the service.