Review: Textfree Unlimited - Send Text Messages (SMS) Free!
by Jose Rios
February 9, 2010
The Overview
Do you wish you could text all you wanted without having to pay a monthly bill? Well Pinger has made this possible. Textfree Unlimited does just that. Textfree Unlimited allows you to send free text messages to any number within the United States. No tricks or scams - just one payment of $5.99 and you will be on your way to sending an unlimited number of text messages - all for free!
Features
Textfree Unlimited has a simple design that lets you easily navigate through the app. When the app is launched all your contacts that you have been texting can be viewed in order from newest to oldest. To continue texting right where you left off, simply touch the name of the person you want to text.
To start texting with Textfree Unlimited you must first create an account, in which you choose a name that will be seen by those receiving your texts.
The app has three main buttons in the top right corner. The first button containing a picture of a circulating arrow is to refresh your texts. The app will normally refresh when launched as well as randomly on its own.
The second button containing a picture of a wrench is for settings. Here you can change the tone heard when new messages are received, there are 30 different tones to choose from. You can also choose from 11 different themes. Themes are a combination of backgrounds and smiley faces. You can even change the name you chose for yourself.
The third button is for establishing a new person to send texts to. You can choose to type in the number, or go through your contacts and find the number yourself. Note that the number must always have the area code for your text to be delivered.
The Breakdown:
The Good: Textfree unlimited is one of the best text messaging apps I've seen in the App Store . The app is simple and not hard to master. You can text all you want, to whomever you want, and not pay a single cent more than the $5.99 initial fee. The Bad: Unfortunately Textfree Unlimited has a few bugs... Sometimes Textfree wouldn't notify me of new text messages until I launched the app, and on more than one occasion Textfree would crash for no apparent reason. I also stumbled upon a bigger problem - that once in a while one of my texts wouldn't even get delivered, but this was a rare instance. Also, even though there are many different tones and themes to choose from within the app, most of them aren't that great, and I wish there were better ones to choose from.
