Handcent Messenger is a wonderful alternative to the stock text messaging program. It allows full customization of your message settings including: notifications, LED, conversation fonts, backgrounds and bubble colors. It also allows quick downloads of attachments that are sent via MMS.
The notification system is probably the single greatest asset of Handcent. By customizing your contacts in Handcent, you can have a different tone/mp3 for each person in your contact list. This makes knowing who just texted you a listening job instead of a looking job.
The second feature that Handcent has incorporated is the ‘pop-up’ notification window which can actually activate the screen and show you who texted and give you options to reply, quick reply, have the message read to you or even just close and mark it as read. A very simple task that was missed in the stock Sense Messaging program.
The last feature that makes Handcent almost indispensible is the reliability of the program. In 6 months on my Evo, I could probably count the number of ‘issues’ that the program has given me on one hand. It is the most predictable SMS/MMS program I have used.
It would have remained a solid perfect 5 on the review had it not been for the last major update that slowed the application and created some lag issues in the messages. Occasionally, updates are done to fix an known issue, but create new ones just as fast. Hopefully, Handcent can eliminate the issues and get back on the perfection track soon. Until then, consider it still one of the best alternatives to the stock Messaging program.
Handcent SMS: 4.5 out of 5 - Free
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