It's great to be able to send smileys via SMS but wouldn't it be nice to have a bit more variety? Enter TextPics, an app that provides over 250 customisable ASCII art pieces that you can text to your friends or add to your clipboard. Adding to the clipboard is particularly useful as it means you can then insert the art into emails or other apps such as Facebook or Twitter.
The variety of art is pretty entertaining. There's the cutesy in the form of bunny rabbits, Halloween themed ones like pumpkins and ghosts and there's even the quirky in the form of the bunny tank. Besides those, there are also ones aimed at occasions such as birthday cake, Christmas trees and even shamrocks. Not all are as impressive or as useful as they could be. Pictures like a man with a moustache are impressively designed but ultimately a bit pointless. The amount of choice is fantastic though.
Besides offering pictures of items or living things, there are also various emoticons, Japanese smileys and even the ability to convert anything you want to upside down text.
It's all rather excellent fun. It's a shame that you can only really text to other iPhone users, as it might not be displayed correctly, but the ability to copy images into other apps is fantastic.
If you fancy trying your luck at creating your own images, you can do so and submit them to the TextPics server, which is a nice touch. TextPics has had various new pics and emotes added in recent updates so if this can be continued for a while, it'll just continue to be more and more useful. A bargain at its current price and even more so in the future by the looks of things.