Leave it to the army of third-party developers, hackers, krackers and programmers to plug the holes and putty-up the seams and cracks in Apple’s line of products. Somehow, somewhere, sometime soon, someone’s going to patch up the good ship Apple, in spite of Steve.
Take the iPhone for example. From a long list, my personal top three missing features are: forwarding SMS, sending contact info and the venerable ability to cut-and-paste text within or among apps.
At least the first two have been taken care of, and nicely too. There have been a few apps that already do these things, if a bit clunkily, one of them being the slow SMSD that can delete specific messages and forward SMS, but often chokes when dealing with a particularly large cache of texts.
My friend Myles turned me onto something called WeTool, from WeiPhone, the “bigest” iPhone forum in China. WeTool does what SMSD does, and does the same thing for call logs as well (as in delete specific items in the call log, something another basic app called CallD does). WeTool also forwards contact info. WeTool puts all these functions in a nice pretty package, and the app works as advertised - it can even forward SMS and contact info to multiple recipients.
To get it just add http://app.weiphone.com/installer to your Source list in Installer, and update. (You know how to do this, right?)
It’s just a bit confusing sometimes because several versions seem to be floating around (there even seems to be one made for the US - WeToolUS - but I’ll be hogtied if I can’t see much difference) and when you update, they all show up. Just get the one with the highest version number and you should be ok. As usual, caveat user; it’s still a 3rd party freebie and comes with no guarantees.
A side note: as some of these things from China often do, the English sometimes gets a bit mangled in the translation, and the About screen on WeTool, for one, is a bit of a hoot.
Hey, it’s free; shut up.
December 9th, 2007 at 4:42 am
As a computer-USER enthusiast, I understand your frustration with the present lack of such common, but useful, features.
But have hope and be patient. All of these features (and others) can and will eventually be added by “software”.
Apple is busy promoting web-based applications, and introducing a SDK. They are also introducing new products and modifying operating systems and Apple software at at furious pace. When the newer OSX operating system modifications for mobile use (including an all-digital tablet in January?) start coming out in 2008…there will be an explosion of capabilities and Apple software/feature compatibilites across the Apple product line. Steve has a plan.
December 5th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
its not working
December 5th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
The article was informative. I too wants to experience the iphone and can’t wait for the Phil release. Procurring in the US, a relative there has to be tied to 2 yrs internet plan with AT&T as it is budled with the iphone. Any other way to avoid it?