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				<img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http://www.allaboutiphone.net/2010/05/app-review-textie/&amp;source=allaboutiphone&amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /><br />
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<p><a href="http://www.allaboutiphone.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/textie.jpg"><img src="http://www.allaboutiphone.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/textie.jpg" alt="" title="textie" width="100" height="98" class="floatright" /></a>Things are getting a bit sparse round here, so I&#8217;m going to get back to the reason I set this website up in the first place: blogging about iPhone things that I come across and find interesting or useful.</p>
<p>In that vein: <a href="http://textie.me/">Textie</a>.</p>
<p><span id="more-3794"></span>I&#8217;ve quite a few mates who are from or have moved to the USA. And I want to keep texting them. Some of them have BlackBerrys or iPhones, but not all. Plus there&#8217;s nothing like the immediacy of texts for me. But texting US friends is just a recipe for forking over cash to your operator; O2 charge me 24p per text. Ouch.</p>
<p>Textie is a joint effort from by the developers who created the equally awesome Tweetie (soon to be released as the official Twitter iPhone app) and location-sharing app Borange.</p>
<p><strong>What&#8217;s good?</strong></p>
<p>The big draw for me is being able to send real SMS to US mobiles for nothing. I&#8217;ve been looking for an iPhone-friendly way to do that for a while. I&#8217;ve been using it for a couple of days now, and it works very well. I send my mates a SMS via Textie (which goes to US carriers via an email-to-SMS gateway), and I get a reply using push notification. </p>
<p>The message and the rest of the conversation is available in the app; it saves drafts when you quit, just like the iPhone messages app.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not just for US mobiles &#8211; you can also send messages (including pictures) to other Textie users and email addresses.</p>
<p><strong>What&#8217;s not so good?</strong></p>
<p>The app doesn&#8217;t do concatenated SMS &#8211; they&#8217;re sent and delivered as two or more texts, which feels a bit retro! It&#8217;s a consequence of using the email-to-SMS gateways.</p>
<p>Also, the app doesn&#8217;t recognise &#8220;00 1&#8243; as a US number, only &#8220;+1&#8243;, so you&#8217;ll have to change any errant numbers in your Contacts.</p>
<p>And my mates get a text from a sender identified as &#8220;Matt Radford via Textie&#8221;, not my UK mobile number. However, the upside is this means that they reply to effectively a US number &#8211; they don&#8217;t have to send a text internationally, thereby avoiding aforementioned heinous SMS charges.</p>
<p>You can send pictures &#8211; but only if it goes to other Textie users or their email addresses. So no MMS, but I&#8217;m not sure I see the point of that. I&#8217;d rather just send them an email.</p>
<p>If your US friends don&#8217;t register their mobile number, then you&#8217;ll probably get an email from them instead of a message within Textie &#8211; leading to disjointed conversation. I&#8217;d rather just have an email chain in that case.</p>
<p>Lastly, no sending SMS to anywhere else but the US. </p>
<p><strong>Anything Else?</strong></p>
<p>It needs a data connection to work &#8211; any GPRS, 3G or Wifi will do. </p>
<p>No sending to Google Voice numbers either (at the moment).</p>
<p>It may be coming to the Mac as well, according to <a href="http://support.textie.me/discussions/questions/7-mac-app">this support post</a>.</p>
<p><strong>In Short</strong></p>
<p>Other apps give you similar functionality, such as <a href="http://www.whatsapp.com/">WhatsApp</a>. But the thing for me is the sending proper SMS. It&#8217;s not a replacement for the built-in Messaging app in anyway, but it does what I need.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s making the move to my first home screen very soon. The app is free with ads, or (and I thought this was quite cute) for £1.19 you can make an in-app purchase to buy a button to turn the ads off. The ads aren&#8217;t intrusive, but I bought that button pretty soon after purchase. </p>
<p>It&#8217;s a bit of a niche app, but it does exactly what I want. Recommended.</p>
<p><strong>Textie</strong><br />
Version reviewed: 1.02<br />
Category: Social Networking<br />
Developer: Borange, Inc.<br />
Current Price: Free, or £1.19 to remove ads<br />
Platforms: iPhone (version reviewed), iPod Touch, iPad</p>
<p><a href="http://clk.tradedoubler.com/click?p=23708&#038;a=1767844&%23038;url=http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/textie-messaging/id353912946?mt=8&uo=6&partnerId=2003" ><img src="http://www.allaboutiphone.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Download_on_iTunes.gif" alt="" title="Textie" width="110" height="40" class=""/></a></p>
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