Textie is the new texting app from Loren Brichter (of Tweetie fame) and the developers of Borange (US-only), and although it tastes best if you’re in the United States of America, I will try my best as a Canadian user, to talk about why it might be worth the free (ad-supported) download.

Textie’s hook is the concept of free text messaging to US numbers, but it also handles threaded messaging app for e-mail and other Textie users, too.

How does it work?

Textie needs an internet connection to work. As far as I understand it, it’s really just a dedicated push e-mail client with a sexy threaded messaging display. It allows you to send to most any US number (T-Mobile is iffy), any e-mail address, or any iPhone that has Textie installed. In terms of actual usage, Textie acts a lot like the default Messaging app on your iPhone.

The in-app Fusion ads aren’t terribly distracting, and you can get rid of them completely for $1.99.

Free texting, free MMS!

For US users without a good texting plan, then Textie could be a must-have. You can register your number with the app, and have responses to your Textie messages routed right through the app — so you should be able to do all of your texting in one app and completely replace carrier SMS. I can’t attest to this, since the app simply won’t work with my friends’ numbers.

The app is also a great way to send pictures to e-mail or Textie users, since pictures are shown in-line, at high resolution. I waited a long time to finally get MMS on my iPhone, and was rather disappointed with the resolution of pictures sent over my carrier’s network. Textie pictures are actually sent at a useful, viewable size.

This is great, but how do I start?!

The crazy thing about Textie is that it can be difficult to know how to use it, and I don’t mean that in the “I have a Twitter account, but don’t know what to tweet” way. The issue I have with Textie is that there’s no easy way to find your own address and send it to people — there is no username query like on MSN, Google Talk, or Skype. You don’t send any requests, you just send a text to an address, and the person just replies…well, sort of.

I “textied” my own Gmail account to find out what my Textie.me address was, but replying to the message so that the response went into Textie was more complicated than simply replying. I had to copy and paste the special Textie.me address from the “reply to:” field, because it didn’t work automatically. I then sent this Textie.me address to a friend of mine, who then textied me from his G-mail account at his desktop. Unfortunately, we couldn’t continue the conversation, because, even though I had received his message in Textie, I couldn’t respond to it. I’d start to type, but the “Send” button (which is all the way in the top-right corner — argh) was always blanked out. I had to manually added his e-mail address in a new Textie thread before I could finally reply.

I’m still not really sure how to find friends who are using Textie. They all ended up registering with their Gmail addresses, so it’s a lot like we’re using Google Talk instant messaging, anyway. For iPhone to iPhone messaging, Ping from Gary Fung still seems like the best method.

Conclusion

If all that talk about Textie.me, manually adding addresses (with help from your iPhone address book), and checking reply-to fields sounds rather complicated, that’s because it is. It might have worked out differently, had I used my cellphone number instead of my e-mail address, but I’d rather leave the texting to my default Messaging app — especially since Textie only works with US numbers. Textie is still growing, but right now, it feels like far too convoluted a system to use. I’ll just stick to my carrier text plan and G-mail address, thank you very much.

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Textie is available as a free download in the App Store. The $1.99 premium version is an in-app purchase. I stuck to the basic, free app for this review.

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