SMS: a good way of life...

Text messaging.

What a wonderful thing indeed. Instant, concise communication that spans the world, without the need to expose your voice or face. It's the last part that makes this way of communication so attractive.

Yeah yeah, it's gonna squash whatever humanity there is left in this world, yada yada... But there is no denying, text messaging has a very important place in life.

SMS (short message service) communication gives you time to think. You don't have to answer someone immediately like a tele-conversation on the premise that you were "busy". Even if you encounter a difficult situation, it is much easier to project an image of calmness in wisdom beyond your natural capability.

Maybe that is why people in my country are addicted to it. It has become the default method of communication. Of course the telcos help in throwing hundreds of free SMS's a month to consumers. For example, I'm on a plan that gives me 2000 SMS/MMS per month. But of course, I exceed that limit without fail. My monthly SMS count is 3 to 4000.

I know in certain countries, text messaging costs an arm and leg. People in these countries tend to be resistant to the idea. I met up with a friend who has migrated to Australia and he says over there, he never sends any SMS's because it costs 50 cents per SMS. 50 cents for one SMS?? Who can blame them? I'm so glad that I'm living in Singapore, where it costs next to nothing to use this wonderful way of communication.

90% of my mobile phone usage is text messaging. 4000 SMS's per month works out to be 133 SMS's per day. I spend around 12 hours a day being active on my phone, which means I am typing out one SMS every 5 minutes that I am not in bed.

So, you can see why the SMS interface on a phone is so important to me. That is why for many years, I never touched an alpha numeric keypad phone. In my eyes, Palm Treos gave us the best ever SMS device. I have not come across a simpler and more effective device that I can SMS on. 

The thing that was crucial to me was the chat thread style of organising SMS's. I don't have to keep saving SMS's as drafts and going back to the inbox to look at the points I have to address while typing out an SMS. Then after that go to Drafts and reopen the saved SMS to continue typing. Bloody irritating. Hence I owned every Palm platform (no Windows rubbish, sorry Windows users) there was.

The combination of a QWERTY keypad, touchscreen and elegantly simple interface made this the best SMS device ever. Alpha numeric keypads with T9 cannot even come close. Before Apple released the iPhone, I was hard pressed to find a device with a similar text input interface. The iPhone came close, but that touchscreen keypad isn't very nice to use. But the most glaring omission on the iPhone is the inability to cut, copy and paste text.

So, for the past 2 years, since I switched over to alpha numeric keypad phones due to Palm's inability to keep up, I have been living with, what I'd call, CRAPPY, texting interface of mainstream phones,


UNTIL

sometime in September last year, Nokia Beta Labs released an application called "Conversations" for S60 phones that provides chat style SMS'ing.




FINALLY!!

It's a decent piece of software. It integrates with the Address Book and creates a new tab where all your SMS are arranged according to contact. But as usual, Nokia being Nokia, the implementation ain't too great. Some things that bother me are:

1) it does not display full SMS's but scrolls to let you read them. I'd rather have the text in smaller fonts but be able to see the whole SMS at a glance.


2) no instant access to predefined replies like "Can't talk now". On a Treo, it is one single touch away.

3) it's a bit buggy and slow

4) no emoticon support

5) it only displays SMS from 4 contacts at once


6) it's easy to confuse my own SMS's with the SMS's that I receive with icons that are almost identical to differetiate them


Oh c'mon Nokia! You are the largest manufacturer of mobile phones in the world! Surely you can come up with something better than something Palm came up with more than 5 years ago?

But as they say, some beer is better than no beer...

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