Alexju SMS Chat is an easy-to-use chat tool that uses standard SMS messages for chat, but pulls them into an easy-to-read threaded interface and displays them all on one screen, the most recent appearing at the top.

When you open the programme, it gives you the choice of who you want to chat to via a drop-down menu. It's all names, no numbers, which keeps things nice and simple, just the way chat should be.

The downside of this however is that you'll have to add a number to your contacts list rather than simply tapping it in, which is a nuisance for new or one-calls. If you add a name to your contacts list while the Alexju SMS Chat is open however, it won't show up in your list until you've restarted the app.

You can add an automatic signature, and you can save your conversation and start a new one via the tools menu. You can select from six font colours but unfortunately these show up as html tags rather than simply changing the colour, making things look more complicated than they need to be.

The same goes for font formatting, but at least your recipient can see the bold, italics, underlining etc as you intended.

One big downside is that your chatee will also need a version of Alexju SMS Chat, otherwise their replies will simply show up in your SMS folder. They'll need to leave the app running too, as it doesn't seem to open automatically when you receive a text.

This latest v1.2 version includes an auto-responder, which allows you to set an automatic response to any text messages you might receive while you're busy, say, in a meeting. You can compose a full-length text for your response if needs be, but you can only have one at a time and there's no option to create different messages for different contacts.

There's also supposed to be an option to send commands to other handsets. That's the theory, at least.

Although the Commands option allows you to send a command to your friend to call the handset you're messaging from, in practice, we couldn't get it to work, and each time it simply said that it had received an unknown command – it may work with some handsets, but not our HTCs.

Alexju SMS Chat isn't a bad little chat app, though we could do without the html tags and it would be more practical if you could use it with friends who haven't installed it yet. A few more tweaks to the usability too would go a long way to helping us towards a full recommendation.

Alexju SMS Chat info

Ease of use:
Value:
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Overall

Platform: Windows Mobile

Cost: Free

Developer: Joulian Alexeev

Website/Demo: Alexju website