Offscreen Technologies seem to have an never-ending supply of odd, single-purpose apps for touchscreen S60 phones. Banner Touch is another addition to the Offscreen stable - this one is designed to turn your phone into one of those scrolling LED displays you see in doctor's surgeries or shop windows.
Why would you want to do that? Well, you might own a really small shop or have a doctor's surgery for field mice and pixies. Or you might just want some way of silently sending a message across a crowded room - say a classroom or nightclub.
Like all of Offscreen's apps, Banner Touch has a simple finger-friendly interface. The big area in the middle of the screen is where the message will scroll, the three icons above it actually do stuff. 'X' quits the app, 'i' shows an About dialog box and the keyboard shaped icon in the middle pops up a virtual keypad.
The keypad is a basic QWERTY layout, with a tick icon to confirm in one corner and a coloured dot in the other that can toggle between Red, Green and Blue text. While it is easy enough to use, we were a little annoyed to find that we couldn't enter text using the (superior) hardware keys on our test N97. Still, it is unlikely you will be typing War and Peace into this thing, so we'll let it go.
Once you have typed in your message, tap the tick and it will immediately start scrolling across the screen. Unfortunately you can't change the font or scrolling speed, but the text is clear and easy to make out at a distance.
Banner Touch is far from an essential download, but it does one thing really well and it is free. It is also only 300 kb, so why not grab it just in case?
