App Review: The comfort of e-mail with the ease of SMS

UBOX

Price: Free

Platform: Android

At a time when everyone is busy staring at their smart phones, one hardly finds time to concentrate on things in hand. We are either checking our Facebook updates or messages on WhatsApp. In between these so called productive screen staring, we also have constant pings about a new credit card, or a spa where one can get massages by beautiful women.

 These promotional messages end up occupying a lot of space and push important conversations further down, leave alone the constant lighting and ringing of the phone. To help solve this dilemma we have a new application called Ubox. It is a new SMS inbox which helps one organize inbox clutter.

 The application assists the user by managing messages just like a Gmail inbox. The messages are categorized and split into folders such as conversations with your Banks, DTH operators and other formats.

The user interface of the application is just fine but if the makers want to sort the messages just like emails as they are claiming a bit more work is needed. For right now the application looks like the updated version of Gmail.

The major categories at present are Banking, Bills, Bookings, Chats, Promotions and Updates, while the ability to create your own category is not available yet. In a way, this defeats the purpose of categorizing ones messages. It helps you split at a macro manner but ceases to do so in a micro aspect.

If you plan to put all your family, friends and colleagues in different tabs, that feature is lacking in the current version. We hope the update manages to fix it though.    

Other than sorting the mails this application also empowers the users to be able to put the undying promotional message on mute. Since the application tries to manage one’s message inbox just like an email account it also helps the user block spam or the promotional messages.    

 “We understand that no one is texting friends and family anymore and when so many people around us started complaining about the constant distraction of SMS’s from businesses we knew it was a problem worth solving. With the onset of digital India, the number of smses we all get is going to quadruple by next year,” said Hameer Virmani, co-founder of Ubox.