Continuing Nokia’s recent obsession with widgets, Nokia Beta Labs has released Nokia Text Messenger - an SMS display widget for Windows Vista desktop PCs.
As well as Microsoft’s most up to date OS, NTM requires Nokia PC Suite 6.85 or later in order to make the connection twixt phone and PC.
The widget sits as a window on your desktop or (in a smaller version) in your Sidebar and PC Suite acts as a conduit to pipe it full of fresh incoming SMS goodness.
Messages can be displayed five at a time in the flowting desktop windows with the compact Sidebar version showing three at at time.
As ever, with Beta Labs productions, the clue is in the website name and you should expect the odd bug, but this is a reasonably polished, if limited in funtion, piece of work.
One thing I find irritating about my Nokia N73 is the way the “You have 1 new message” popup doesn’t give any clue about who the message is from. The only way to find out is to open the message, or to cancel the popup and look in my inbox.
Yes, I know, it’s incredibly minor and petty, but admit it - you find it annoying too.
S60Ticker might be what I am looking for. This app runs in the background and - whenever you receive a text - displays a tickertape with the incoming number or contact name and the beginning of the message
Screen position, colours, font and duration are all configurable and there is a development kit available which holds out the possibility of plugins to display other info such as RSS feeds or news alerts.
S60Ticker is freeware from here, but unless your German is up to scratch you should go here for a Google Translation. Executive summary - install this (the main app), then this (the control panel).
One of the more hotly-anticipated features in the forthcoming Windows Mobile 6.1 is Threaded SMS. This groups your sent and received SMS messages together so you can see the ‘conversations’ that have taken place. It’s a simple idea, but as anyone who has used a threaded email client (or Google Mail) will tell you, a very useful one.
If you can’t wait until 6.1 arrives, Threaded SMS can be yours now if you splash out $14.95 on SMS-Chat from Vito Technology.
A Windows Mobile 5 & 6 and Pocket PC app, SMS-Chat features the aforementioned message threading plus multiple SMS sending, quick contacts search and one-finger touch scrolling (on compatible handsets, obviously).
It’s not quite as useful as Gmail, mainly due to the limitations of SMS - the lack of subject line makes it difficult to delineate between different conversations with the same person, but it is a definite improvement on basic SMS and should make multiple mobile chats a little easier to follow.
You know when you have found a good mobile app when you start wishing it was part of a phone’s standard user interface.
TextQuick, an S60 app from Mind Flip software is such a simple, useful idea that I’m amazed that Nokia hasn’t incorporated it into the S60 Contacts function as an alternate view.
The app lists all your contacts in text-frequency order - those you text most frequently at the top, the people you never text at the bottom.
Creating a new message (or placing a call) is as simple as highlighting a name and pressing the D-pad - no more typing the first couple of letters of people’s names or making contacts called ‘001 Mum’, etc.
TextQuick can take a second or so to start so the latest release has the option keep the program running in the background for faster activation.
TextQuick costs $9.99 from Handango, with a one-month free trial.
There are no shortage of Instant Messaging clients for Windows Mobile and Symbian, and it takes quite a bit to impress us here at Pocket Picks.
Palringo is a new multi-platform IM app for Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 3rd Edition, Windows and Java that might just make the grade.
Palringo supports all the popular IM services (Google Talk, AIM, MSN, etc) as well as its own network. The most significant difference between Palringo and these other services is the addition of Vioce and Picture messaging. Using your phone (or PC) you can take photos or short audio clips and send them to your Palringo contacts. You can also send these through to some of the other supported networks, where they will appear as a web link to the hosted file on Palringo’s server.
If you are a heavy IM user perhaps the most useful feature is the ability to sign in to multiple instances of each service. I use one Google Talk account for work and another for chatting to friends and updating Twitter, etc, and this is a feature I have been waiting for for a long time.
There are still a few rough edges - new IM conversations can end existing ones, for example - but these are being worked on by the Palringo development team.
Palringo is a free download, available here.
As labor saving devices go, this goes beyond lazy. A new application called ShakeSMS for S60 devices allows those of you with accelerometer equipped handsets to save yourselves a couple of button presses every time you receive a message. All you need to do is shake your handset once to view your new message and then again to lock your handset. Sounds strangely appealing to us even if it is a little unnecessary. Just watch the video below to see it in action.
(Via IntoMobile)
It seems Apple’s v1.1.3 firmware update for iPhone isn’t meeting universal praise from users. In fact, many Brits are complaining that the update has messed up the way their iPhone sorts text messages, making conversations look out of order. That’s as in ’sorted in the wrong order’, obviously, not ‘well out of order my son, cor blimey etc’. One of the new features of the update was the ability to send multiple texts at once, so it’s a bit embarrassing for Apple to have this problem emerge.
Apple has already ‘fessed up to the issue, admitting that “when sending or receiving text messages on the iPhone, the SMS messages may be displayed out of sequence”. Its advice is to make sure your iPhone is getting its time from the mobile operator automatically - a setting that can be found under General > Date & Time in the Settings app.
“If the issue continues after turning this setting on, the issue may be occuring because messages are being sent in quick succession,” Apple’s advice goes on to say. Which isn’t exactly helpful, given that so many text conversations take that form.
(via Information Week)
And now time for a heartwarming story about a texting seal (yes seriously). An orphan newborn seal named Victoria was recently rescued from rough seas near the island of Tinos.
After a short stay with Society for the Study and Protection of the Mediterranean Seal (Mom) the little mite will be returning to the big drink on Saturday equipped with a souvenir from her human rescuers, a mobile phone.
As you might expect, it isn’t a Nokia N95 what with sea based mammals having little cause to watch YouTube videos and all. The device will merely be a transmitter that sends regular texts to Victoria’s rescuers, letting them know where she is and how deep she has been diving.
According to one MOm staff member, text tech is considered to be more reliable than satellite monitoring. The Mediterranean Sea must have great reception.
(Via textually)
Apparently mobile IM adoption is set to triple in Europe over the next five years. A new report from Forrester Research suggests that mobile IM usage will grow from its current eight percent adoption rate to a much more substantial 24 percent by 2013.
That will push the subscriber base up from 26.7 million to 80 million and is apparently thanks to the familiarity that young people have with PC based IM applications combined with the continuous introduction of more IM capable handsets.
The inevitable upshot of this is that SMS revenues will suffer with a prediction that up to 13 percent of SMS traffic will be displaced by IM services in the next six years. Even so, it is not all doom and gloom for the humble SMS as the same report suggests that there is growth in that market too, with traffic expected to climb from 190 Billion messages in 2007 to 233 Billion by the end of 2013.
Big numbers indeed but it is about time that overpriced text messaging had some decent competition.
(Via mocoNews)
Foreign languages are not a strong point for the British public (apologies to those of you who are fluent in a second tongue), so GoogleTalk’s new IM translation bot is sure to come in handy for many of us.
The translation bot automatically translates IM conversations so that even if you and the recipient are not linguistically compatible, you can still chew the fat, blether, blab or whatever you want to call it to your heart’s content. For those of you that don’t know what a bot is, the Google Talkabout blog describes it as “a piece of software that acts as a chat contact and provides some fun or useful functionality.”
But ‘where’s the mobile angle?’ we hear you cry. Well if you are a user of Fring (as in the clever mobile VoIP client) you can use the service via your mobile as GoogleTalk is one of the supported services. All you need to do is add @bot.talk.google.com with the correct preceding code for your chosen language (for example, for an English to French translation you would send [ en2fr@bot.talk.google.com ]) as a friend in GoogleTalk and send it a message. Very clever stuff indeed, hit the jump for a full list of the supported language codes.
Continue reading ‘Talking your *IM* language with GoogleTalk and Fring’
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