I love Swype on my Android phone, but I still prefer typing on a full keyboard. For that reason, I’m not a big texter on my phone. If you’re like me, and prefer typing on your computer keyboard, then DeskSMS might interest you. DeskSMS is an Android app that lets you send and receive text messages from your computer.

To get up and running with DeskSMS, you install the app on your phone, and then install either a chat client or browser extension on your computer or tablet, or use Gmail or a web interface. When you install the app on your phone, you check boxes next to which services you want your text messages forwarded to.

Text messages then show up at that destination, and you can send messages from there as well. I just set it up with the Chrome extension, since I almost never use a chat client. The web client, shown below, can be opened right from the browser extension.

One word of warning – DeskSMS looks like it is free from the Android page, but that is actually just a free trial. When the trial expires, you have to pay a yearly $4.99 subscription fee. The listing in the Android Market doesn’t mention this, and I can’t find a developer website with any information on the trial or the subscription. I had to comb through user reviews on the Android Market to get that information. It’s a shame that the developer isn’t more up front about the cost, because in my trial of the app, it worked really well.

There are a few other apps that work similarly to DeskSMS. We previously covered AirDroid, which includes texting among several other features. If you have a favorite app for sending and receiving texts from your computer, let us know in the comments.