iPhone App Reviews

POV: SMS-BOX Christmas Time!

Swain Valasek | Dec 16, 2009 Lifestyle, POV

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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* “POV” (Point of View) is a new feature that we’re testing out *

Flysoft’s rating: 9.0
IAR’s rating: 7.0

Russian developer Flysoft arrives in the Nick of time (see what I did there?) with a nifty little holiday messaging app called SMS-BOX Christmas Time!  Does it send visions of sugar plums dancing through your head or give you a case of the humbugs?  Flysoft is pretty confident it’s the former so let’s see what they have to say first then I’ll try to confirm or deny with plenty of opinions along the way. 

Flysoft’s summary:

What SMS-BOX Christmas Time! does:

The following option might be added – integration to contact list, so that user can see whom he had already congratulted, whom – not.

Features and improvements planned for the future:

- increasing the number of texts and cards

IAR’s take:

In a nutshell this app lets you send either text-based (via SMS) holiday messages or quite artfully created greeting cards (via MMS).  Oh you can use email too but texting is so much more fun isn’t it?  Yes, we know the Apple SDK prohibits 3rd party apps from talking directly to the ’Messages’ app but hey, they can still talk INdirectly right?  As a workaround the app copies your message/card to the clipboard then closes itself down and launches the Messages app where you simply paste and send.  Not elegant of course but it gets the job done and works just fine (not to mention there’s no other choice anyway).

Having someone else do the thinking for you is nice sometimes so the wide variety of text greetings is a good thing.  In fact, they’ve got them organized into the following categories: Wishes For, Happy New Year, Toasts, Jokes, Short Poems, Invitations and X-mas.  A few problems do exist however.  The grammar and syntax are not always accurate and there are several duplicated entries in the Toasts section so a little QA/QC wouldn’t hurt.  Fortunately, you can edit/change every greeting within the Messages app before tapping send.  Also, and this is of course just my opinion, many of the messages are kinda sappy/silly and it would be hard for me to find situations where I’d use them as opposed to just composing my own text messages to friends and family.

Fortunately however, the real highlight of this app is the greeting cards.  It should be noted that unless I’m seriously missing something, the paid app has 39 cards, not 50 (perhaps the Lite has 11 others?).  Anyway the cards are illustrated quite skillfully and make for good holiday eye-candy.  Each one comes with a default caption but as with the text greetings, they are often grammatically incorrect or just simply make no sense (probably just yer basic translation issues going from Russian to English).  Fortunately, you can edit/change these as well before you send which is great and adds a lot of value.  Useful hint: you can easily turn a text greeting into a card caption without leaving the app by just pasting it in.

Note the paid app (not sure about Lite) is not for kids as it contains some adult humor and subject matter.  Oddly, I didn’t receive the standard Apple warning about this when downloading the app although Flysoft does represent this fact adequately in the iTunes description.

My biggest suggestion to make this app better is to add more content to the greeting cards as in my usage this was the exclusive reason to load it up (and as mentioned whoever did the art for them is quite good).  Also, I’d love to see landscape support added to make typing captions for the greeting cards easier for the more fat-fingered among us.

Hold on to your sleighbells folks, the developer was kind enough to provide 10 promo codes for us to publish so head on over to the comments section!

Tags: $0.99, christmas cards, holiday, mms, sms, Swain Valasek