Review: ThreadSMS
Score:
80%
Version Reviewed: 1.0
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It’s always useful to look at other mobile operating systems and see how Symbian compares. One area that I’ve always been jealous of from the Treo’s and Palm OS is the threaded SMS viewer. Unlike the single ‘river’ of SMS messages that the built in Messaging application provides, Palm OS would group messages between you and a single respondent into sequential order (the conversation) so you could easily follow the back and forwards. Think of it in the same way as emails getting put together in Gmail and you’ll be there. 
So I was a happy man when the E-Series blog pointed me towards ThreadSMS for S60, and it was an almost instantaneous install on my E60. So what do we have? Well each conversation appears as one line on the main screen, which you then go into to get the full flow of chat. Then just hit Options to send your reply.
ThreadSMS also has a nice UI trick up its sleeve – a bundle of smileys. This is a simple substitution (i.e. if the application sees :-) it will replace it with the correct icon. Which means you get a lovely looking message, and if the person you are talking to has a similar system (for example UIQ devices) they’ll also see graphical smileys, otherwise the textual version is still easily understandable.
Being a replacement for a built in application means that ThreadSMS has to do a lot of background work to keep up to date with the System. You’re advised to keep it running in the background so that it can monitor incoming SMS messages and have them ready for you in the application view. I especially liked the fact that when you read an SMS in ThreadSMS, it is marked as read in the built-in Messaging application as well.
What ThreadSMS doesn’t do is override the 'you have a new message' popup dialog – hit Read on this and you’ll still be taken to the built in app. But with the update rate of ThreadSMS and new features being added all the time, I hope this is something that will be taken care of in short order.
And that’s important – while ThreadSMS isn’t the complete application yet, it shows every likelihood of becoming well rounded over the next few weeks. The fact that I’m more than happy to use it as the main SMS interface engine now shows a good product, and with a roadmap of changes (archiving SMS to text files is due for the next build, for example), it can only get better.
Ewan Spence, 14 April 2007
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at