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We are going to have an online poll using SMS in an upcoming ceremony. We also want to show the result of the poll on a large screen using a video projector. The idea that I have is to use an android phone to receive text messages and forward them to a PC using a TCP/IP connection. If the message is forwarded to the PC, I can handle the rest of the things easily. Now, I have two questions regarding the above idea:

  1. Do you know any application of piece of code that forwards any incoming text message to a given ip address/port number?

  2. Is an android phone capable of handling a large number of text messages? That would be 100-200 messages per minute. The latter issue is a more important one since I have no clue about the number and I cannot test the scalability of the system since the day of the ceremony.

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  • What device are you planning to use?
    – user13391
    Commented Jun 25, 2012 at 8:24
  • The Android device will probably be able to handle such amounts, but I fear that network speed could be a problem. With my experiences multiple messages arrive with minimum a second between them. Commented Jun 25, 2012 at 10:50
  • @RichardBorcsik: I have an XPERIA X10 but I can find other devices as well. So, it's not a real problem, I guess.
    – Helium
    Commented Jun 25, 2012 at 15:50
  • @StevenRoose: That's a good point. I think I should ask my network operator about it.
    – Helium
    Commented Jun 25, 2012 at 15:51
  • @Mohsen Or just wait a minute longer :) Commented Jun 25, 2012 at 21:10

3 Answers 3

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It isn't difficult to create the necessary code to listen to incoming messages, handle their data and send them to a TCP socket. I've done such an app but can't release it's code, unfortunately. All I can say is it's pretty simple, just research incoming SMS handling (for example here) and sockets (for example here).

As to your other question, there is some latency when receiving SMS, but this depends on your carrier. They store the messages in a queue and send them to your phone as fast as they can. So, depending on your carrier they may have some limits on how many messages they accept into the queue.

You can estimate the delay in the messages by sending a SMS to your phone from 2 other phones simultaneously, and check the difference in receiving the messages. You can then estimate the handling speed per minute. For example, if there's a two second delay, it would take (200*2)/60=6m40s to process 200 messages.

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I can think of two approaches:

For one, there is android-notifier, which claims to react on events (amongst others: incoming SMS) and sends notifications to a desktop pendant (multi-OS). As the source code is available, it could be investigated (as to replace the pc desktop application by your own processor) and adapted.

And then there always is Tasker (with good documentation and a free 7 day trial available at its project site). It also can react on, amongs others, incoming SMS, and perform different actions (also on the SMS' text), such as e.g. "browse url" (you could urlencode the SMS and send it as parameter, I guess -- the "http get"/"http post" actions is probably smoother, as easier to configure with parameters), "compose email" (again can be processed asynchronously at the PC), and more (see already linked project site for details).

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If you just want to see the poll results without addition processing in your computer, I would suggest the following two apps:

  1. Poll-Box
  2. FastFeedbak Lite

With either of these apps you can receive the SMS (text messages) and display the result in the device's screen. This device screen can be displayed in any larger displays using HDMI connection or other screen cast apps. If this solves your issue, you can totally avoid your dependency on the computer.

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