Review: SMS Chat

Published by Steve Litchfield at 9:09 UTC, February 4th 2010

David Gilson reviews SMS Chat, an SMS manager application which shows you your text messages in a conversation view, and throws in a lot more features too. If you are tired of the same-old S60 SMS manager and want something new, then you might like to check out his review of this actively-supported utility.

Reading & composing messages in SMS Chat

Read on

In addition to David's review, another AAS guest reviewer, Julian Grail, has been looking at SMS Chat as well:

"I have been using SMSChat for about a month on a Nokia N97 with the latest firmware.  The application installed without any fuss or bother, which is always a good start.  I have always been a big fan of Nokia Conversations so I was very pleased to be given the chance to try SMS chat on my N97. I have around 900 text messages on my phone and I found that the first time the application was started, it took a long time to load and sort the messages - this could be down to my hardware, but I did find it frustrating.  I also found that the application tried to be too complicated; having many menu options and choices. A good example of this is that when you select a contact from all of your messages, you are presented with a menu of choices which requires another screen press to get you to your SMS conversation - which is the core purpose of the software.

My biggest gripes are: firstly, the lack of built in help, which, given the price, is a big omission; and also the fact that the application does not integrate into the contacts or messaging applications, which means it has to be loaded separately (and on a RAM-restricted device like the N97 this can cause problems) - in fairness to the developers, they may be precluded from doing this by Nokia but it would be nice if this application added functionality to the existing core applications instead of reinventing the wheel in certain areas. Overall it is a nice application, not sure that its worth $14 to me."

You comments welcome on the app or on both reviewers' remarks!


 

Filed: Home > News > Review: SMS Chat

Platforms: Series 60, S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition

Categories: Software

News Discussion

Unregistered
Isn't this function fulfilled by the home screen contacts on 5th? They certainly do have messages from each contact grouped together.
vuaglio
this program is not bad, i tried it and found it somewhat better than what i've seen before. However, i ended up uninstalling it because when you get a message in sms chat you also get it on your default client and when reading only in sms chat it doesnt remove it from the default client. It was annoying to see my read messages still unread on my homescreen. It has potential most definitely but they need to incorporate it more and make it faster because even the opening of messages would take quite a bit of time.
phil9500
hi,

I use this app for quite a long time now and i'm satisfied with it. There's a setting "mark as read". You should enable that. By the way... i think its not good to replace the built-in client. It's an alternative view, not a messagingclient.
Unregistered
Sorry while this is a great app, $14.99 to buy it, this firstly should actually be part of the phone anyway, non threaded SMS clients in this day and age is just lazy (Nokia come on)

Secondly this is way over priced, I can and have gotten Profimail for less than this and SMS Chat is no way near Profimail
krisq
I prefer Free iSMS.
lightbulb
Quote:
Originally Posted by krisq View Post
I prefer Free iSMS.
Ditto!

Don't know who the author or where the original site is, I found it via one of the other mobile news sites a while ago so I may be on an old version: http://dailymobile.se/2009/03/13/sym...0v3-and-s60v5/
jApi NL
Unregistered
lol - $14.99
iPhone has had this free since it's launch
Unregistered
Has anyone tried SMS Diary? (http://www.olamelen.com/)

It displays all sms in a long scroll-able thread, allowing you to
view your 'conversation' either with all, or one of your friends.
You can export the whole thread as a html file stored in your
phone, which can then be viewed in a web browser, or transferred
to your PC.
Unregistered
have been using free isms for ages. needs self sign but its free and is just like iphone screens.
Unregistered
I suppose I just don't "get it". When I had my iPhone I never found the threaded SMS an advantage. Maybe if I sent and received SMS from fifty people a day it could come in handy, but for one or two people, meh... My memory is decent enough I can recall what was going on.
Unregistered
The best Threaded SMS in this field is www.ehandysoft.com's ThreadSMS. It have more features, iphone style, private sms, schedule sms, flash sms...(this should be called "Power SMS manager"). and the same price.
Unregistered
This is the page:http://www.ehandysoft.com/threadsms.htm, I became to its user 3 years ago, workhard company.
hakapes
I am coming from the Palm Treo 680, and there threaded messages are the operating system default. I was very frustrated at the beginning on my Nokia E63, that the messages appeared seperately.

I have installed both Nokia Converstaions and SMS Chat.

SMS Chat seemed to be good at the beginning, and after one day of struggle with the trial version (could not really evaluate the features), I have paid for the registration. But then, I gave up using it. It had the same amount of disadvantages as advantages, and it was just an extra complexity for me.
Things that I didn't like:
- SMS Chat cannot replace 1:1 the built in application out of the box: has to be started seperately, I need to manually map buttons in phone settings, and will be always a parallel reador to the built in app.

- New message warning appears both in built-in app and SMS chat. I have to read it in both apps to clear warning messages. If new message warning is disabled in SMS chat, then when I click on the new message warning, the built in app starts.

- Required many keypresses to finally arrive to a message within its thread:
1. Start app
2. Scroll down to "All messages", select
3. Now I have a list with contacts. Select the contact, select "Open chat" from the pop-up window
4. I am at the thread finally.
5. To see the date-time of a message, select message, scroll down to details, and finally can see the details.
(Right-Left scrolling with the Navi key can make it faster, but still needs continous back and forth.)

- When writing a new message, I cannot see the full thread, just the new message that I am typing.

- Initial start (with scanning of messages) is slow each time it is started. As the applicaiton accidentally can be closed, this is a major annoyance.

The trial version is useless, before opening any thread, there is a pop-up message that delays the viewing. It took so long, that I had to ask the author, that is this a built in feature, or my device is slow/I have too many messages. I wish I had spent the money on something more useful. I use it only once per 2 weeks, when I really want to see my messages from somebody in a thread to find a particular message.

I don't recommend it.

Nokia Conversations gives a similar experience (with many back and forth browsing and unecessary clicking), and it is free. I don't use Nokia Conversations neither anymore, though, just the built in app. It doesn't have the features that I need, but at least it is fast.

Full thread: 14 Comments / Post New Comment

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