If you were to witness a crime, but didn’t want to ‘get involved’, a new SMS service could make it easy for you to help the police without revealing your identity.
Already in use by Canadian CrimesStoppers, TipSoft SMS allows users to send information to an central number that strips it of identifying data and forwards it to law enforcement.
The anonymity is two way, so if the police want to ask for further details they can ony do so by using the service in reverse.
Unlike so-called ‘Zero Knowledge’ authentication systems, presumably there is some record connecting your phone number to a particular tip so that the reverse contact can take place. Even if the facilitating company promises to keep this information secure, it may be possible that a court order could force it to be revealed.
TipSoft SMS is to be rolled out in the USA later this year and may reach the UK soon after.
Ooh, this is a clever idea. If you use Google Mail you might be impressed by all that lovely storage space (6.5 GB at last count!) but somewhat stuck about what to use it all for.
Well, it’s not likely to make too big a dent, but if you own a S60 3rd Edition mobile and have £9.95 burning a hole in your paypal account you could always spend it on GSync - a new product from Psiloc that lets you archive you SMS and MMS messages to your Google Mail inbox.
The app could barely be simpler to use - it just sits in the background and sends SMS/MMS messages to Google Mail at a specified schedule. Messages appear as emails (obvious, really) and the system makes full use of Google Mail’s ability to group together messages by the same person.
The software can only sync up to 200 messages per day - this appears to be a limit set by Google rather than Psiloc - any extra message are simply queued until the following day, and then uploaded.
But seriously, who gets more than 200 texts a day?
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.
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)
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)
I am forever missing calls and texts due to my phone being at the bottom of a bag or a pocket and my ears being full of MP3s. Remind Me looks like it could save me a considerable amount of grief - perhaps it will do so for you.
The app runs on S60 3rd Edition phones and reminds you (do you see what they did there?) about a missed text message, email or calls by playing an alert every couple of minutes until you deal with it. You can configure both the alert tone and volume as well as the period between reminders.
Reminders are tied in to your phone’s Profile settings so you can elect to receive (e.g.) only call reminders while in ‘General’ or SMS & Email reminders while in ‘Outdoor’ mode.
Remind Me is available from MobiFun on a 10-day trial - the full version costs 10 Euros.
Rmbrme is a clumsily named (all the good URLs are gone, remember?) but possibly quite useful mobile service that is meant to make it easier to, well, remember people.
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