The Best SMS/Mobile Phone Contact Synchronizer Application I've Ever Tested

http://ivsms.indovisi.com/

I've scrutinized an SMS application I've been promising a review of, Indovisi SMS version 2.8. This application is an exceptionally good SMS handler and, as far as you are not using any kind of accents in your contact names, contact synchronizer. For a complete comparison of the program to its alternatives on the Pocket PC, please read this thread, paying special attention to the comparison chart. In here, I only present a brief summary of what you can expect from this particular application. The background information (how the comparison chart should be handled) can be found in the above-linked thread. Note that the following section is heavily packed with links – feel free to click them to see the linked screenshots. Pros: - Bluetooth-wise, supports both the BTC and the standard BT serial port - Much as it's not an always-connected app, it's able to periodically check for new SMS messages – unique in this respect. - Skinnable dialer (not compatible with native VGA though!) - Compound contact upload - Notices and synchronizes changes in existing phone/PDA contacts records – unique in this respect! - Is able to download Sent messages as well from the phone to the PDA (the most lacking feature of most other phone/SMS handler apps) - Imports from both SimpleSMS and mPhone export files - Searches in SMS messages – unique! - Button assignment for faster work - Export format is readable and is very similar to that of SimpleSMS; much cleaner than the export format of other SMS handlers (if they offer SMS export at all) - Synchronizes the phone contacts directly with the PDA Contacts – the best in this respect - It has a protocol-level log screen - no other SMS/phone handler app supports this, except for Peter O'Neill’s SMS. - Built-in smiley shortcuts, editable pre-defined answers - Editable quick replies. With them, it only takes a tap-and-hold, clicking Quick Reply from the context menu and a click (choosing a reply sentence) to answer. - It has far more sophisticated signature and message quote settings than the SMS apps. Cons: - No accented (not even Western - Scandinavian, German, French etc.) chars in contacts – using them will ALWAYS result in resynchronization attempts! - No compound contact download from phone to the PDA - No Unicode characters in outgoing SMS messages; inserts a _ (underscore) character as a placeholder (western accented chars work OK, though) - Price not directly cited; can't be downloaded from Handango/ PocketGear - Can't read from/write to the SIM while reading/writing contacts - No support for multiple GSM phones/accounts (unlike with SmartGSM) - It has password protection, but it's very weak and buggy: 1. the datafile (IndovisiSms.dat in the home directory) isn't encrypted and can be easily read as a Unicode file 2. when you give it a password, you can also enter non-numeric characters; however, when you restart the application, you are presented a numeric-only screen. In this case, in the Registry (please see this registry roundup for more information on editing the Registry) just set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Indovisi\Indosms \Setting\IsActivePass to 0 (instead of 1) to be able to log in to the application again to change the password to a numeric-only one. Therefore, because of its being so weak, this password protection should not to be taken seriously. It'll only make your SMS messages unreadable for anyone that doesn't know how to look inside files in the file system and doesn't really know where WindowsCE programs store their information in the Registry. Bugs: - the not-even-Western-accents-in-contact-names bug - while synchronizing hundreds of contacts to the PDA I've run into "Out of memory" problems (with tens of Megabytes free RAM and no running apps in the background). - in the Settings tab, the SMS centre number help is pretty strange (see the first sentence!) Annoyances etc: - Make sure you, unlike with most other SMS client apps, always use the full number of the recipient because it automatically inserts a + sign before the number. That is, if the recipient uses the same operator, refrain from using the "short" number (the one without the country code/operator prefix). Bottom line: This application is a very good SMS and phone handler app having some really unique features. I really recommend it for both an SMS and a phone synchronizer clients as long as your contact names don't contain accents. EDIT (06/12/2005): 1. I've continued playing with the program on my other PDA's/mobile phones and found out that the Out of memory bug reported above is a generic problem with the application and will cause problems if you try to transfer/synchronize more than appr. 200 contacts from your mobile phone to your PDA. Then,remember if you exit the application, IndovisiSms.dat in the home directory will become a 0-byte one (that is, effectivey deleting all your SMS messages stored on the PDA) and Indovisi SMS will refuse to start. You can easily avoid problems resulting from the former problem by simply copying IndovisiSms.dat before doing mass contact synchronizations between the PDA and the phone. The latter can be easily fixed by either copying back the previously backed up file to the home directory of the application or just deleting the 0-byte IndovisiSms.dat. 2. the Contacts can't even have Western accents problem is a generic problem too (not just related to the t610) - the application isn't able to synchronize my accented (Finnish - which is a Western language) Sony-Ericsson t68i contacts either.