DO YOU find it tough getting across precisely how you are feeling in the confines of a 160-character text message? Your emoticons just not cutting it? Then Nokia may be coming to your rescue. Last week, the company filed a patent on a new breed of cellphone capable of “light messaging“.

The idea is that when you send a text, the phone’s software lets you choose a colour that represents your mood – red for raging angry, perhaps, blue for sad, or yellow for mellow. That colour is then encoded with your message and is used to illuminate an LED array on top of the recipient’s similarly equipped light-messaging phone. 

Despite this is not an original idea – I had some Siemens Mobile devices in the past and some of them already carried this feature, plus the Underline and Bold functions – I find it very cool and very useful, and I think people will get addicted to this. Now I ask: is this for both S40 and S60 devices or just for S60 devices? It would be great to add this feature to a wide range of devices.

The inventor of the system, Nokia’s Teppo Jokinen, hopes it will “enrich and improve user experiences“, according to US patent application 2009/0117850.