GO SMS

Summary

Sending text messages or SMS (as they are called in most parts of the world) is the most popular cell phone function of all times. Who actually still uses their phone to call people nowadays? Texting has become the preferred way of communicating, especially among the younger generation. Given the importance of text messages in our daily lives, it’s important to have a messaging app that fits your functional and esthetic needs. For those unhappy with the default Android messaging app, there are now several messaging replacement apps that offer you more than you are used to. GO SMS gives you a tempting alternative, but is it a good one?

The idea behind GO SMS is simple: to provide users with a better alternative to the regular built-in messaging app. So, basically, the app lets you create, receive, manage and organize all of your text messages with a personal touch. In theory, GO SMS promises to provide with more options and settings to give you more comfort and control with your app.

At start-up, the app automatically accesses all of your text messages and displays them as a list in chronological order. Names, contact pictures, phone numbers – it’s all there exactly as it was on your regular SMS app. So what’s the big difference? GO SMS may not look different at first glance, but it includes a huge number of customizable settings to personalize the look and feel of your texting experience.

Pressing the menu button exposes all of the settings (two pages full!):

• Batch mode - mark and delete multiple messages
• Search – search for text messages by contact name
• Find SMS – find text messages by entering in keywords
• Settings
• Help
• Vote – vote for which features you would like to see added to the app
• Share – share text messages via Facebook, Twitter, Gmail etc.
• Check update
• Delete all
• Mark all read
• More apps
• Feedback
• Night Mode – dims light for better reading in the dark

Here I see one major improvement in comparison to your regular messaging app: GO SMS lets you search for messages according to their content. That’s a really neat and useful feature that is not included in the HTC stock Messages app.

Besides sending regular text message, you can add the following to your messages:

Smiley
Contact card
Quick text (SMS templates)
Subject
Pictures
Audio
Slideshow
Videos
Capture picture
Capture video

Although it’s great that they include all of these multimedia features, I can’t think of a good reason to text large video and audio files to each other. Sending it via email would be much more efficient (and cheaper).

Finally, in order to activate GO SMS make sure to turn off notifications on your standard app (Setting/Received Messages). Otherwise, you’ll get double notifications on incoming text messages.

Bottom Line:

GO SMS is a really good and well though-out text messaging app. It’s a worthy replacement of the default Android messaging program. I do, however, think that the developers went a little bit overboard by adding every single possible feature to this app. I couldn’t help feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the settings and options (more on that in Screen & Controls).
 

GO SMS displays all of your messages grouped by contacts in a single inbox – just as in the regular messaging app. Compose a new text message by pressing the pencil icon on the top right of the screen. The look and feel of GO SMS is extremely similar to that of the iPhone. In fact, I think this app is geared towards people looking to add an iPhone look to their text messages. What makes GO SMS special is the fact that you can choose from a wide selection of themes that are fully customizable.

Appearance Settings

This is where you adjust and customize the app’s look. You can use one of the three pre-installed themes (iPhone, GO and Dark) or download special themes ranging from Christmas to Valentine’s Day. Some of them are cool, but most of them are pretty kitschy and poorly-designed. In addition, you use different fonts by downloading font packages for GO phone. The appearance of the inbox is fully customizable – you can select the background picture, font, font color etc. To be honest, the number of options is too much to navigate through for your average user. Who is willing to spend an hour customizing the way their text messages look? Seems a bit superfluous to me. You can adjust whether the messages are displayed as bubbles (like on the iPhone) or in comic book style squares

Notification Settings

Here you select how to get notified about new messages. You can use any ringtone or mp3 as your notification sound. GO SMS lets you select an entire song as your notification sound. Can you imagine having to listen through all of “Yesterday” every time you receive a text? Who would ever do such a thing? Beats me!

Unlike your regular messaging app, GO SMS can also notify you about an incoming message with a pop-up window (fully customizable as well).

Individual Settings – set personalized ringtones and other options for individual contacts
Send Settings
Receive Settings
Security Settings – put a lock on your private messages

As you can see, there are just too many preferences and settings to be able to go into detail about all of them.

Bottom Line:

Despite the overkill in terms of settings and customization options, GO SMS is easy to use and navigate. While some of the downloadable themes are bit lame, the iPhone and GO layouts are neat and clean looking. In general, I could see this app replacing my regular HTC Sense messaging program.
 

The app’s amazing speed is its biggest advantage! GO SMS performed much faster than the stock messaging app on my HTC Hero. In my opinion, this is what makes the app most appealing.

The app is also extremely stable and reliable.
 

GO SMS is available to download for free from the Android Market. Totally ad-free!