Beaten to the punch line...

Well I was about half way done with my SMS application when I came upon this – looks like a much easier solution (for me, with a rooted phone atleast) than to just make a whole new application to do it all. This one is from ultimind over at the xda-developers forums;

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> Playing around with the ls -R command, I found where the SMS database is kept, and it's somewhat readable in a text editor... _UPDATE (thanks staulkor): This database is viewable, and searchable using an SQLite database viewer._
>
> > **Code:** /data/data/com.android.providers/telephony/databases/mmssms.db
>
> Just run the following command to back it up to the SD Card:
>
> > **Code:** busybox cp /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db /sdcard
>
> Happy hacking

Obviously you need your phone rooted, and busybox installed - though for most that shouldn’t be a huge problem. For now this suits my needs so the SMS project will most likely be put on hold until I have more time to finish it.