Palringo Review - Multi-Service Mobile IM Clients

For Multi-Service Mobile IM clients (IM mobile apps), I had a choice between Palringo, Fring, OctroTalk, and Mundu IM. The first IM service I tried was Mundu, and I was pretty impressed with it, the user interface is far superior to the other IM services, but the one negative thing about it was that it seemed to use texting to send IMs, as it took relatively a while for people at the other end to receive my IMs. I am not sure if Mundu uses texting to deliver IMs as sometimes it would deliver quicker, but overall its IM deliveries were at least a minute later. That for me is a big negative as texting involves time delay, and during an IM chat, being on time is essential. As I have unlimited internet, data consumption isn't a problem for me and I would like my Instant Messages to be "instant" rather than being delivered a minute later.

Fring was another mobile app I downloaded. It was a mess to download it to my Motorola Q9C. It didn't download properly, and then neither did it install properly. Due to the delays and problems, I was already annoyed with Fring, and didn't spend much time on it. The few instances that I did use Fring, I was quite annoyed with their "self promotion" in status messages. In status messages, it had something along "brought to you by Fring", I am not sure if you could take it out, but at this point I already ruled out Fring as a mobile app I want.

Of all the mobile apps, Palringo seemed to offer the perfect compromise for me. It was free, and used internet to deliver IMs, so there was no delay in IM deliveries. The user interface was pretty decent, not as "glamorous" as Mundu, but pretty usable. They have picture, and voice chats too, but you maximize the benefits only if other users are using Palringo. One negative thing I didn't like on Palringo was that it didn't offer archives, and you couldn't put custom status messages. The lack of these two features is a big no no for me, and hopefully they correct it in the future. On another note, it would be nice if it told other users in status message that I am on mobile, as a lot of times, my friends are quite annoyed at my low typing speed, and then I have spend another 2-3 minutes that I am chatting from a phone, hence the delay. The adding of friends is also quite convenient, and the number of IM services available, including Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messnger, ICQ, and AIM is also a plus.

I really do not recall much of OctroTalk, but one of my friends does keep using it. He apparently likes OctroTalk much better than Palringo.

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