Tuesday, 15 January 2008

1 message received

A messaging freak that I've become, I find it really irritating and punishing when my operator - Vodafone strips me of my precious daily resource of 100 free msgs on a few (dubiously) chosen days. What makes it even worse is that they do it without any prior notice (on the contrary, Airtel supposedly 'expresses itself' days in advance) for a number of days preceding, including and succeeding D-days like Diwali and New's Years day. Their choice of days, unfortunately, is limited no more than a pug's choice of place to micturate. Whats more, they go on to charge more than the normal rates on these days. Disgusting. Distressing. Depressing. But then, since they have offered me such an economic plan, I have no right to complain I suppose. It still feels very unfair however. Well, you can't 'eat the fish and have no bones too'.. can you?

So I hit upon this idea to use my gprs to rescue me from these traumatic message-less days. When browsing for softwares once, I had come across apps that let you send msgs over gprs at no additional cost. So it would cost me a trivial amount (just 10p since I'm charged a minimum of 10p/10kb). Theoretically, that is. And if my assumption that data rates are the same even while on roaming, my strategy would beat the pug paws down!! Thus began my quest for THE sms software. I did find a few apps here but none really worked the way I wanted them to. And it became clear that they all used more than one session to send a message. So even though total data did not amount to 10kb, the cost would be more than the min of 10p (since the min cost of a session is 10p). And more data transfer for receiving a msg. So its all straight forward math that the apps that I'd tried would just not work out.

Why am I writing all this then. The fun part is I hit upon this sms software called NexySMS 2. Its use? It lets you send/receive msgs from your comp. All you Nokia users out there must be grinning thinking, "Nokia PC Suite lets me do all that". But this app does more than that. All messages are automatically presented as conversations. So its like a true online experience, akin to chatting with your friend over shall I say, Gtalk!? The app connects to the cell via bluetooth/IR/cable. It keeps track of all the msg history and it lets you synchronize its phone book with your cell as well.

And personally, what makes it even more useful to me is the fact that my house is 'geographically handicapped'... a network black-spot in other words, due to the terrain. Only the window sill in my room has sufficient signal strength. With Nexy, I can now afford to just place my cell on some vantage point and converse with friends sitting at my laptop just about anywhere! Isn't that cool!
This is a shareware and comes with a 30 day trial period. With some toggling of the system clock of my comp though, I [unintentionally] managed to freeze its sense of time, giving me an unlimited 'trial period'!! So for now, its game on !!!