Nokia Conversation alive and kicking again

Nokia Conversation is among the most useful programs that came out of Nokia Beta Labs. It adds messaging-style threaded SMS to your address book, similar to GMail's threaded conversation or the way SMSs are grouped on the iPhone. But unlike the iPhone and GMail way of doing things, Nokia Conversation lets you delete individual messages without deleting the entire message thread.

Nokia Beta Labs killed development of Nokia Conversation a year ago, but now Conversation is alive and kicking again and it works on all S60 v3 Nokia's, including those with Feature Pack 2.

Nokia Conversation integrates with your contacts list, not with the messaging app, but you can set Conversation as an active standby icon or launch it with the left or right softkey. If you have lots of messages on your phone, Conversation can slow down opening of the Contacts application up to the point where it gets really annoying. Interestingly, the old version of Conversation from last year that runs on my Feature Pack 1 Nokia 6120 Classic does not slow down Contacts, so this is apparently a new bug in the new Feature Pack 2 version.

Nokia Conversation can't handle cyrillic characters, so russians will probably feel left out.

When I tried to remove Conversation from the Application Manager, the uninstaller complained about not being able to complete its job. I had to fire up KillMe (I guess JBak TaskMan would have worked too) to close the Contacts application that Symbian keeps running in the background before I could uninstall Conversation.

• Nokia Conversation at Nokia Beta Labs

• Nokia Conversation mirrored on MobileCastle (just in case Nokia removes one or more versions of Conversation, they've done that before)