I used to love watching those old James Bond films and checking out all the cool stealth equipment he used. The great thing is that, with today's technology these kind of gizmos are now in existence.

Take, for instance, HushSMS, an application that allows you to send stealth messages from your Pocket PC. In essence, this means you can send texts to another cellphone without the recipient ever getting knowledge of it. This is useful, for example, if you need to ensure that a certain phone is in use and that you can send information to it.

It's simple enough to use. You type the number of your recipient at the top or open their details from your contact book. Beware though, because for some reason you need to have the international access code in front for it to work. Once you've done that you need to choose the message mode. You can plump for a 'class 0' message, which is a Flash SMS, a simple PING to check the recipient's phone is on, or a normal SMS message.

Then it's just a case of entering your message and sending it. Be sure to check the box to request confirmation if you so desire. The great thing about the program is that the recipient won't know who has sent them the message and will instead just get something like 'Network Message' in the From field.

This makes it great for pinging another phone, but I can't help thinking there are more sinister things you can do using HushSMS.