Microsoft has slowly been recultivating its smartphone vision via a tight nit of interconnected apps, services, cross-platform cloud computing solutions and today the company added yet another seemingly crucial building block to their expansive mobile strategy.
Last year, users in India were given access to Microsoft’s SMS Organizer, presumably for testing at scale, but as of today, the SMS Organizer app for Android is getting a full US, UK, and Australia rollout via the Google Play Store. The Outlook-esque app claims to automatically sort messages by personal, transactions, promotions and starred settings uses machine learning to organize incoming text in a similar fashion to email.
While text messaging and email are two very different beasts. SMS Organizer uses a similar level of machine learning to flag and sort incoming messages, ideally catching promotional spam and Robo texts. Additionally, SMS Organizer can create contextual reminders and alarms based on the content of a conversation chain that includes departure dates, movie and concert bookings, flight or train scheduling and more.
In practice, the app pulls and backs up messages to a Google Drive account allowing it run side by side with full and archived text saved in Google Messages. Even as robust as the app is right now, it still lacks some feature parity with Samsung, Google or Whatsapp messaging platforms as it does not support MMS for now.
The SMS Organizer app is relatively feature-heavy for a seeming start-up experiment out of Microsoft’s Garage team, but then again, this is how Arrow Launcher and found its stride as the face of the company’s smartphone efforts, now title Microsoft Launcher.
Perhaps, this time next year, SMS Organizer will have received a few more updates and becomes bundled with the Microsoft Launcher as yet another way for the company to hijack Android and turn it into a revised Windows mobile effort.
