Review: SMS-Chat and Fun Contact from Vito for WinMo

Vito software, a Russian mobile software development house has recently updated to of their applications SMS-Chat and Fun Contact.  Both applications make SMS and Contacts on your Windows Mobile device far more finger friendly.  I’ve been using them every day for a while and after the jump you’ll find some more details on these excellent applications, available for sub £10 each.

If your a WinMo user and your device doesn’t happen to be version 6.1 you’ll benefit from the likes of SMS-Chat by Vito.   This cool app gives you threaded SMS messages, which basically means they’re organised conversationally.  So every SMS I’ve sent to or received from a contact are organised nicely.  I tested SMS-Chat on a Touch Dual running WinMo 6, the second major benefit of the app is that it provides a far nicer interface for sending and receiving texts.  One of the things I particularly liked was the notification for new texts which popped up right in the middle of the screen.  If you receive a link in the text then it gives you a simple "finger friendly" button to press to go to the link.  I have only one minor criticism of the application – it takes a while to load, it has to conversationalise all those texts.

Fun Contact is another great bit of software from the same vendor.  It replaces the standard contact manager with a far nicer looking UI.  It’s finger friendly again, and as with SMS-Chat its easy to scroll through your contacts with your finger, but flicking.  The great feature of Fun Contact over other contact managers is that it has an on screen alpha numeric pad, that lets you type in parts of one of your contacts name or number and, much like the intelligent dialling feature, brings up their details.  You can also setup favourite contacts for quick access.  As with SMS-Chat it takes a couple of seconds to load.  One thing has always bugged me with contact manager replacements, the inability to add new "Live" contacts, that is contacts that are stored in Windows Live i.e. replicated to the cloud.  What Fun Contact does offer is that ability to edit your contacts with the normal contacts application, which means all the fields are available.

What I’d love to see is, SMS-Chat fully replacing the original messaging client on my device.  Id like the mail client to get a better UI!  I’d also like to see the directional pad able to scroll through the contacts or messages too and I’d love to retain the my normal "start bar" with the signal strength etc. on it.

Overall I really like both applications and they’re a worthy install on your device.  This seems like a great software house too, some of their other products are really innovative and there’ll be some more reviews of their stuff coming soon.