I actually remarked the 2 highlighted lines as these were the source of a vague error when I ran JUnit tests in Eclipse. While I'm not exactly sure what I "fixed" (if you can call it that), said error disappeared and the SMS went through. Wohoo !! :D
FYI, the code I used was actually derived directly from the examples given with smslib but funny enough it took the hack above to get them working on all those 3 phones I tested.
