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Now that I’ve shown you how easy it is to sign your own applications, I couldn’t wait to show you this awesome application that I found for threaded messaging on S60 – the way it should be done. Most of you have probably tried out Nokia’s rubbish Conversation application that merely presents your texts in a threaded view, but doesn’t integrate into the phone at all. Free-iSMS changes all that, and it works awesomely.

The single best thing about Free-iSMS is that it takes over for the default messaging system, including for new message notifications. You can see in this screenshot, it’s popped up over everything else, and not only says I have a new message, but also shows me the sender’s name (if they’re in my address book) as well as their phone number. Definitely handy information, and when you press the center d-pad or the left softkey, you’re taken straight into the Free-iSMS application.

Below is an idea of what the conversation view looks like. The white bubbles coming from the left are those from the sender, while the green ones coming from the right are my responses. You can also see the blue one – that’s a message that hasn’t been read yet. What’s also great about this is that after a few moments of that blue message being onscreen, it’s automatically marked as read and changed to white – without me having to click to open it or anything. Definitely a better user-experience than Nokia’s silly Conversation application offers.

Also, as you can see in this screenshot below, each message has a time and date stamp, so you can easily keep up with when the conversation took plate. Also, at the top of the screen it shows the sender’s name and phone number, so that you don’t forget which conversation you’re viewing.

In the main list view, you can see your most recent conversations listed. Here, you can see the sender’s name, along with a breakdown of the conversation below. For instance, in the first entry, you see [0/4/3]. This means there are 0 unread messages, 4 received, and 3 responses from you. Definitely a convenient way to check things out quickly. You can also adjust the size of nearly every text block in the settings of Free-iSMS, as well as set the application to autostart, if you wish.

Another great feature of Free-iSMS is the ability to setup scheduled SMS. This is something that S60 has needed for a long time, for sure. You can set the receiver number, which is kind of neat for prank SMS, and then you can set the content of the message. Below that you can choose the specific time and date to send the message. You can also send fake SMS, if you want to have a message pop up on your phone at a preset time.

Free-iSMS is, as you might have guessed, free, but it’s only available unsigned. You can use this walkthrough to get a dev. certificate for your phone, and then sign the application. It’s well worth it, and this is easily an application that Nokia needs to get Symbian Signed QUICKLY.

If you like Free-iSMS, I’d recommend that you swing by the developer’s site, and leave him a donation, as well, for his hard work in creating such a complete application.

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