SMS Popup

On Android phones, when a novel message is received, a notification shows in the sliding panel showing the user the number and contents of the new message. While this is a useful way of displaying the message, it does not give you the instantaneous of the iPhone’s pop-up notifications. Instead, you have to move the panel down, click on the message, wait for the Messaging app to launch, and then type in your reply. There are a number of apps in the Android market that help to abbreviate this process by displaying the SMS as soon as it appears and enabling you to immediately respond to it. SMS Popup is one of them.

• Disabling Default Notifications

   In order to prevent conflicting notifications it is cautious to disable Android’s default notifications. To do this launch the Messaging app, click Menu>Settings and uncheck “Notification”. This will terminate all SMS notifications, so you must re-enable this if you would like the default Messaging app to handle all your notifications.

The beauty of SMS Popup is that it can be used only for notification purposes, while at the same time you can use your default messaging app to reply to new messages. Simply be sure that your standard text messaging app has notifications enabled and SMS Popup does not mark messages as read or delete them. This app is a great example of what makes the Android platform so fulfilling many functions; it fills a very small gap created by a lack of functionality in the Android OS default Messaging app.