Back to All ArticlesLet's admit it, we all have skeletons in our cupboards when it comes to SMS (text messages). A while ago, a friend's girlfriend sent him a text telling him to send the 4th and 5th sms on his phone to her. It is called the gossip game. You should be honest about it and send the 4th and 5th sms on your phone to the requester. You should as well forward the game to others by asking them for the 4th and 5th sms on their phone. The aim is to see the crazy text exchanged by people daily. But did my friend sent the texts to her? No! Why? The 4th and 5th texts on his phone were 'implicating' texts from two other girls 
Beyond players however, there are times we find the need to keep our sms confidential. Some sms contain sensitive information like passwords, account statements, medical notification, etc, that we may not want everyone or someone in particular to see. The problem however is that most times, our phones are already in that other hand before we know it. You may be innocently asked for your phone under the pretence of admiring it and unknown to you, they are off to your SMS inbox. Your phone may even be sneaked away from you just to access your SMS.
And so there was SMS lock - a feature to let you lock your sms with a pin and protect your texts from prying eyes. SMS lock comes inbuilt with some phones - Motorola phones especially. If you however run on a symbian OS and your phone doesn't have an inbuilt one, there are a lot of SMS lock applications you can download. I have added one to the apps download section of this site and is available here. If you run on a Java phone with no inbuilt sms lock (most Sony Ericsson phones for example) it is a little bit complicated. To make you understand better, have it in mind that the access of java apps to the phone's sms system is more constrained than that of symbian apps. Generally, like I've mentioned once or more, the freedom of Java apps on phones are more constrained than that of symbian apps - a reason you find some very frenzy symbian apps with functionalties you hardly find in java apps.
So back to the talk on the SMS lock app been complicated for java phones. SMS lock apps on java need to build a pseudo sms system on the phone. This means it has to listen to every incoming sms, provide its own storage system for it, format it for display and provide other possible options like forward, delete, reply, etc which is very complex; a reason you don't see them around that much. In fact, listening to incoming messages is one big ish on its own.
So next time you are planning for a new phone, you should consider one with an inbuilt sms lock or that supports one depending on how confidential your texts are.
