We've seen SMS come a long way in the last 10 years. What once was a phenom largely used in Europe's ubiquitous GSM systems has become a global sensation used from small kids to aging grandparents. Raking up billions of text messages a month qualifies SMS as critical mass, yes? Anyhoo, Samsung wants to complement or even shove aside text messaging interfaces like T9 and Motorola's iTap and create a Gmail-like "text threaded conversation" using a new guided process for in-phone text messaging services. Samsung's new patent includes processes like mapping phone numbers from incoming text messages to stored pictures of the sender and creating SMS threading that emulates an IM interface. Yes, we all know IM and some SMS chat apps are available on hundreds of millions of recent phones, but nothing is beating the quantity of sent and received text messages using conventional means. Samsung may have this new "interface" on its phones "very soon;" we hope on the new Ultra units.

[Via Unwired View, thanks Staska]