App Review: Handcent SMS

The Handcent app for your Android phone is perfect for the person who's bored to death by Android's texting platform. The enhanced SMS (short messaging service) and MMS (multimedia messaging service) allow users to completely customize their messaging experience.

This app gives you a lot of options when it comes to changing the look and feel of your phone's messaging function. With Handcent, you can put your conversation in a more aesthetically pleasing bubble design, change the color of the font and background, alter the font style, and choose whether or not you'd like to see your contact's assigned photo next to his or her name.

When you open Handcent on your phone, you see a list of your contacts, which Handcent has borrowed from Android's contact manager. You can choose an existing contact or hit a button at the top of the screen to start a messaging session with a new contact.

After choosing a contact to message with, you see a screen containing the message stream from your most recent previous messaging session with that contact. You simply begin messaging and continue the stream. The interface includes a phone button at the top of each messaging screen, in case you decide to bail out of the messaging session and call the person.

My favourite part of handcent is all the personalizing I can do with it. Changing the colour background to my favourite colour and having texting bubbles come in with pictures and defined colours by me. I will say that choosing your colour can be a bit of a task if you are not familiar with photo programs as you have to mix your own colour in order to personalize your phone.

I have customized my message alert to only show in the taskbar of my phone. For those not on unlimited text plans you can also keep a running told of messages you have sent in a month and ask it to restart at the beginning of every month.

The main reason I downloaded handcent was because I was having a problem sending multimedia files using the messanger that came with my phone. After some research online many of the people mentioned that to correct this problem they just downloaded handcent a free messaging program for android platforms. So off to the market I went to download handcent once I downloaded it I remember a friend (thanks Heather T) mentioning that she used handcent and preferred it.

The app integrates with your phone's camera and image-view system to attach a photo (just-taken or in memory) to a message. Once you've attached it, the image shows up as a thumbnail in a new bubble in your conversation stream.