DEMO: Send an SMS slideshow with Highnote

Mobile multimedia messaging application Highnote announced today that it is launching an updated version of its app at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference.

The app lets smartphone users send a slideshow to their friends. It’s billed as a way to send more rich media without being constrained by the limits text- and media-messaging have. Naturally, users can only send their messages to other Highnote users.

Users can create messages to single recipients or groups and do some pretty heavy-duty editing — at least, by mobile standards. They can change the color of the text, the alignment and other elements of the actual message. Highnote users can also save quick replies, such as a “love it” or “can’t right now” to speed up replies to messages.

Highnote users can add other types of media to their messages, like video, sound clips, map locations and songs from their iPod. Users can add two pieces of media per slide and nine slides per message. If a Highnote user sends a message to someone without the app, the recipient will receive a link via text message to view the slide show.

But part of — if not the whole — appeal of text messaging is that just about every single phone in existence has text messaging enabled. So it’s a quick way to message other people who doesn’t involve picking up the phone, and there’s basically a guarantee that they will be able to reply back using a text message as well. Media messaging, or MMS, also has the same appeal — almost every phone or carrier has the service enabled.

So it’s like a cross between social networking and texting, but still only works if everyone uses it. It does send text messages, but following a link to the slide show online kind of defeats part of the purpose of the application — immediacy. That’s part of the appeal of messaging application Kik, and why it became so popular — it was simple and blazingly fast.

The application is available for free on iTunes and on the Android Marketplace. Versions for Windows Phone 7 and the BlackBerry operating system are in the works, according to the company.