Don’t underestimate this seemingly trivial app – it is among the top ten ranked social apps on the Android Market. The app’s functions are quite straightforward; it allows you to add text art to messages and you can choose from various text and ASCII art that come with the app in addition to symbols that are available on its keyboard. The app works with anything that has text input, including email, SMS message, Facebook and so forth. Since it uses standard characters and symbols, the text art won’t turn out to be scrambled chunks of characters even if you sent it to mobile phones of different models.

The app comes with 17 categories of text art. Simply click on the categories to browse through the text art.

After choosing the text art you want, touch it to perform the desired action (i.e. copy it to clipboard to paste it elsewhere or mark it as a favorite for easy retrieval later).

Apart from the default text art, the app also comes with a unique keyboard of symbols. After installation, go to Settings -> Language & keyboard; check the box for “Symbols Keyboard” and you will be able to access it by toggling input methods.

You will find 3 pages of cute symbols on the Symbols Keyboard. The symbols work really well with text messaging.

Symbols Keyboard & Text Art Pro can be downloaded from the Android Market for US$0.99 (approximately NT$32). But you can find similar apps on iOS by using “emoji” or “Symbol text” as the keyword in your search. I won’t comment on the contents of the app (whether or not the app is worth the price of admission is up to you to decide), but in addition to the text art that comes with the app, the greatest selling point of Symbols Keyboard & Text Art Pro has to be the Symbol Keyboard, which offers many more unique symbols than standard keyboards. With it, you will be able to have more interesting dialogues on Facebook/Plurk or in your SMS messages.

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