Cell Phones With SMS Search & Other Desirable Messaging Features

Yesterday, I was ransacking my cell phone's inbox to find an information that my friend messaged a couple of weeks ago. To my horror, I had 1200 messages in my inbox, which I never realized until I started searching! By searching, I just meant a human-eyeball search. That was the only way I could search through a high profile PDA like Nokia E71x. How unfortunate! Yeah, I'm not kidding. I had to literally sift through each and every SMS in my inbox to locate the message. Nokia E71x wasn't powered with an SMS search. Infact, I've not seen this feature in any of the cell phones I've used in the past.

Though I did find a few SMS-search apps for Android and iPhone (noted below) as I was googling, I wonder why this feature isn't one of the basic features in any cell phone. What does it take for the cell phone manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and a whole bunch of other mobile players to include this as a basic feature in their phones? I agree that it's got to be a feature of the OS, but how difficult is it to incorporate the same in a Symbian or a Windows Mobile? The Android-based app that I've listed below, is hardly 65KB, and costs $0.99!

Anyway, if any of the big players out there are reading this post, the following are some of the default features that I'd personally like to have, in any phone that is capable of messaging:

Search the inbox and email messages using keywords such as name, phone number, venue, etc.

Include an option to bookmark searched messages

Enable tags to group similar messages

Block messages alone, from a particular cell phone number

Lock selected messages - make it password protected

The phone should get locked automatically, when an SMS with a unique code is sent from a pre-configured cell phone. This will make the phone unusable, if it gets lost or stolen.

Any other ideas, dear readers? :)

Maybe also have SMS-Search powered by, say Google Mobiletop*? This will be the Google Desktop for cell phones. If google comes up with something like that, it'll add yet another feather to Google's cap, I'm sure. Perhaps, Google will also take the search to the next level - search SMS by voice! Google already has a mobile app that does a similar thing. Check out this link, and grab your free download, if you're not already aware: Google Mobile

Coming back to the SMS-search apps for Android and iPhone, click on the following links, and enjoy your downloads!