I’ve hated other “free texting” apps for the iPhone because they either have shitty interfaces, or they just take waaaay too long to load.
Textie is written by Loren Brichter, developer of the awesome (and soon to be official) Tweetie client for Twitter. That was enough to get me to download the app, as I consider Tweetie one of my most indispensable apps on my iPhone and Mac. It’s free with ad-support or you can pay $1.99 within the app to get rid of the ads.
Textie requires a simple user signup, but once that’s done it looks and feels almost exactly the same as the official “Messages” app on your iPhone, complete with message threading. The best thing about Textie is that it loads just as quickly as Messages does. It supports text and picture messages between email or Textie users. Of course, you can text any mobile phone as normal for free. Unfortunately you can’t MMS, though.
We’ll see how I feel after using it in the wild for a couple weeks, but as of now I’m in love. Go grab it.
(Man, Lefsetz was right, tech guys are the rock stars of the 21st century. As soon as I knew “the guy from Tweetie” was behind this, I gobbled it up like a side project album from “the guy from Radiohead”.)
Textie Messaging for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store.