SMS Magnifier is a mobile app for Nokia touchscreen devices that simply does what its title suggests: It magnifies the type size of SMS text messages.

If you wear reading glasses, as I do, the standard type size of an SMS message is too small to read ‘naked’. That means you have to hunt for your reading glasses. But when you are out and about – at a concert, say, or walking down a crowded street – that can be annoying.

With SMS Magnifier, you no longer need to hunt for the reading glasses. Instead, you simply enlarge the message’s type size – I explain how below – and suddenly, you can read text messages without needing your glasses. Since reading glasses are essentially magnifiers, SMS Magnifier does the work your reading glasses would normally do.

Also, when you reply to a text message, SMS Magnifier is smart enough to keep the type size as large as it was in the original incoming message. In other words, you can reply without glasses, too. This is true even when you respond to an older text message that you had previously stored in your phone’s SMS inbox.

Here’s a sample of how the text size can be expanded, courtesy of JPH-Soft, publisher of SMS Magnifier:

The settings are quite simple. There are just two options: ‘Auto popup’ and ‘Autostart on boot’. For each, you either switch the option off or on. When Auto popup is switched on, any incoming text messages opens immediately within the SMS Magnifier app. And when you switch on Autostart on boot, SMS Magnifier automatically launches itself whenever the phone is powered up.

Actually, there is a third option, namely, whether you switch the app off completely or hide it. Select Hide, and the app goes into background mode, which, in turn, enables Auto popup. If you instead select Exit, Auto popup cannot work (since the app is completely switched off).

Once you’re selected your settings, SMS Magnifier is ready to work its magic. There are two ways you can use SMS Magnifier to enlarge SMS text: Either swipe the screen from left to right, or use the device’s volume/zoom switch. Either way, I found it works quite well.

You can also go into your SMS inbox, reopen older messages, and reply to them, all using the SMS magnification feature. To do this you simply select Options > Open Inbox, then select the message you want to reply to.

There are a few limitations. In the latest edition of SMS Magnifier, version 1.20.0, reply messages cannot be longer than 160 characters. Also, in the publisher’s release notes, the company states that SMS Magnifier sometimes crashes when returning to the main window from Help. But I did not enounter this issue while testing the app on a Nokia N8. And the app works well in both landscape and portrait mode, although when the text is expanded, some text can be obscured in landscape; for example, in the screenshot above, you can see that the text is large enough that the Exit command is mostly cut off.

SMS Magnifier is available on Ovi Store, and it sells for $1.99 (USD). The app runs on all Nokia Symbian touchscreen devices, including the new Nokia N8, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7, and Nokia E7.