The Good
- Integrates with iPhone contact list
- Supports push notifications
The Bad
- Only 100 free texts
- Recipient must have app installed
The TigerText app (X Sigma Partners LLC, Free) has a very simple premise - don’t let your text messages come back to haunt you. Unlike most text messaging services, Tiger Text lets you control how long a text will be stored on your recipient’s phone.
Tiger Text: An App for Cheaters?
Tiger Text's motto is "cover your tracks," which gives you a pretty good idea of what the developers had in mind. They swear they came up with the name for Tiger Text before the Tiger Woods cheating scandal, but it is pretty convenient timing.
The default setting is for text messages to automatically delete after 24 hours. In the settings menu, you can change that to several hours or even 15 minutes, but if your recipient doesn’t read your message in time, you’re out of luck - it will be deleted anyway. You can also select a ‘delete on read’ option, which will delete the text message as soon as it’s read.
While TigerText is free to download, it only comes with 100 free text messages (or 15 free days) before you have to start paying $0.99 a month for 250 text messages. If you send a lot of messages, you can pay $2.99 a month for unlimited texting. This actually isn’t a bad deal, especially considering that unlimited texting with AT&T will cost you $20 a month. AT&T's plan includes video and photo messaging, though, while Tiger Text is text only.
The recipient of your text messages must have the Tiger Text app on their iPhone or iPod touch (versions for other smartphones are not yet available), so you could only use this as your primary texting service if all of your friends have iPhones as well.
Tiger Text does have a few cool features, including push notifications when you receive a new message. You'll see little paw prints on your sent messages (instead of text) so you know they've been deleted. The app also integrates with your iPhone contact list.
The Bottom Line
The TigerText app has received a lot of buzz because of its intended use and the fact that it was released during a major celebrity cheating scandal. If you have a problem with someone reading the text messages on your iPhone, won’t that same person be suspicious when they see you’ve downloaded the cover-your-tracks Tiger Text app? It could be useful as a general texting service (only $2.99 a month for unlimited texts), but they’ll have to add support for more types of phones before that would be a real option. Overall rating: 2.5 stars out of 5.
What You'll Need
The TigerText iPhone app can be used on the iPhone or the iPod touch, and you'll need iPhone OS 3.1 or later.
