This is a guest post by Dana Harrison. Check up on his other activities at The Linux Experiment and his other posts on audiophonik.

Hi, all!  You may have noticed already by reading my slightly different name, or perhaps you’ve heard of me over on the wildly popular site I co-founded, The Linux Experiment, but I am not the usual Phil.  My name is Dana, and I’m a young professional working in Information Systems for a large insurance company.  I work with Phil and also had the pleasure of founding The Linux Experiment with him.  This is my third guest post for audiophonik.

This time around, Phil has asked me to do another review for an application available on Google’s Android platform: the shiny and efficient ChompSMS, now running on (yay!) Android 2.1 as my carrier – Rogers – has finally pushed out this update to my HTC Magic+ hardware.

ChompSMS: Sounds tasty

ChompSMS is an Android-only (and decidedly rather handy) replacement to the built-in ‘Messages’ application used for sending and receiving MMS / SMS / pretty much any other kind of MS / on the Android platform.  To give you an idea of how stone-age their own messaging application is, I can’t notice any change between its current iteration – on Android 2.1 – and the one that was on my phone last week, using Android 1.5.  I’m almost tempted to root my phone and slap on Froyo, just to see if there’s any difference in the stock messaging app.

Old and busted...

...new hotness.

ChompSMS is supposed to offer a lot of new features and generally ‘beef up’ the stock messaging options available on Google Android, and comes with a huge list of things it supposedly does better than Google.  Among them:

• The UI has been changed to mirror that of the iOS platform – which I could really do without, but it looks better than stock
• The ability to send SMS / MMS over the ‘ChompSMS’ network with the purchase of ‘credits’, for a much cheaper rate than your provider
• A host of new notification options for you to choose how you’re notified about received (or even sent!) messages

Now, that’s certainly a lot to claim: let’s see how ChompSMS stacks up against its supposed abilities.

Finger-Chompin’ good

Now, I can honestly say that I haven’t personally purchased credits or paid for ChompSMS in any way.  While it does tout itself as a ‘free program’, there is a premium version available for a few bucks that will remove the streaming advertisements from the program’s main window.  In all honesty, they’re pretty out of the way, but I have accidentally tapped on one or two while attempting to select the top name on my messaging list, mostly due to my own poor motor skills.  If ads are the sort of thing that really piss you off though, go for the paid version; I’m seriously considering it.

The first three things with which I immediately fell in love using ChompSMS are as follows:

1) Notification options

Seriously, this should just be available in the stock version of the Android messaging application, but apparently Google has not yet looked that far into the future and gleaned that much information from its search engine users.  ChompSMS grants me the ability to use either my LED (located near the earpiece) OR the trackball (which pulses white) – or BOTH! – to notify me of texts.  On top of that, I can even select what colour I want the LED to flash, and it’s much easier to select any of my usual songs as a notification sound – no silly messing about with folders on the SD card.

2) Truncated message strings

On top of the fact that it just handles message strings more beautifully – much more intuitively than the stock application – one issue I ran into several times with the stock application is the fact that, well, some of my message strings get rather unwieldy, and I don’t want to have to delete texts to use my application.  For example: before erasing my phone for the big Android 2.1 update, I had over 3000 some messages with my girlfriend that I didn’t particularly want to get rid of.  Trouble is, every time I opened her string in the messaging application, it would take forever to load all of those messages.

This is where ChompSMS comes in handy: it only loads the last ‘so many’ (I say this because I haven’t counted) messages immediately, with the option to ‘open older messages’ at the top of the string in button form.  As it turns out, this has been a total lifesaver in that I’m now not waiting forever for my messages to come up, and the application itself actually has a smaller footprint as it’s not loading every single text in the history of mankind into memory.

3) Replies from the lock screen

This is honestly a no-brainer.  The quick ability to reply as soon as a message comes in – even right from the lock screen – is just about the handiest and simplest thing they could have thought of.

The ugly

The only things I’ll complain about with ChompSMS are as follows:

1) It shouldn’t have to mirror the Apple iOS UI for texts in order to remain functional and pretty.  They should really try to ramp up development of their own, better-than-Google-and-Apple UI to distinguish themselves from the rest of the garbage out there.

2) I hate ads. Honestly, you would think they make enough from people purchasing their damn ‘credits’ to send texts over their network to be able to remove ads from the free version of their program; I’m totally torn about whether or not I want to shell out a few bucks for a messaging application, or just remove it and use the stock one again.  Or just toss a few Google ads on your site – nobody would even mind!

The closing statement

All in all, ChompSMS is almost a necessity for someone who texts as much as me – I almost regularly come close to my 1000-text-per-month cap on my plan with Rogers, but am usually careful not to get too close to the top because I know how much they love to bleed me for money.  If you’re a more recreational, or less frequent, texter then I would imagine you can stick with the stock application and be just fine, as long as you’ve paired it with something like Swype.

Go to your Market, get ChompSMS, and be happy – you will thank me later.  Here’s a handy QR code for Android users!