Thursday, May 08, 2008

SMS-Chat just got better

Vito Technology listens. It’s always gratifying to see a company that is as responsive as Vito. In a matter of months, Vito has managed to issue several new releases of their innovative SMS-Chat client making significant improvements each time.

I have previously reviewed the program in depth, so I’m not going to go into detail here other than to cover some of the significant innovations. Suffice it to say that SMS-Chat is an attractive, finger-friendly, easy to use SMS client for touch screen WM devices that will thread your messages and organize them by contact, time and date. It is also capable of sending a message to multiple recipients.

Perhaps my biggest complaint about older versions was that an incoming text message would pop up on your screen. This unfortunate feature represented serious security issues and potentially embarrassing situations. In the new version, you can turn off this feature. Hooray! Mission accomplished.

Another welcome new feature is the ability to create response templates of quick stock messages such as On phone, Call me later, Let’s do lunch, and so forth. You can custom create your message, and then just pull up the list under Templates, tap on it, and out it goes to save your time and effort.

Hyperlinks are not available in SMS-Chat for the first time. You can tap on a link, and it will navigate to the designated destination. Any phone number in a chat functions as a link as well. Tap on the number to dial it. I appreciate both features. Thanks again, Vito.

The press release I received says that it is possible to change skins in the new version, but I could not figure out how to do it and do not think it is possible. But it would be a good idea because it comes with a kind of doomy, gloomy black presentation.

From the Contact menu, you can Add Recipients, View Contact, Send phone number, Select Templates, Delete Chat, Minimize, or Cancel, which represents some new functionality as well.

It sure would be nice if SMS-Chat included some emoticons the next time around. It really would be nice if you could change that gloomy black color scheme as well.

But, it certainly has made rapid strides of improvement in a short time. Keep up the good work, Vito.