Yes another social butterfly post. Forgive me. Socialness seems to be all the rage these days. Everyone has it seems 3 or more different messaging accounts. I guess one isn’t good enough anymore. Though I can understand this if you have many friends of whom each one is partial to a particular client, then things get dicey for you. That is where multi-chat apps come in to save the day. Instead of having five different apps running with five different chat windows each, everything is now nicely organized into one app. In the push to be social while mobile, multi chat apps for mobiles has really taken off. Today we’re going to look at IM+ by SHAPE services.
IM+ is a multi-chat app that has been around for many years. Blackberry users should know by now that IM+ while priced above the rest (more on this in a bit) is still at the top of the list as far as multi chat apps are concerned. To start off, IM+ supports a plethora of chat clients that include:
- AIM®/iChat, MSN®/Windows Live, Yahoo!, MySpaceIM, Jabber, ICQ, GoogleTalk, and Facebook.
As you can see pretty much every popular mobile chat client underneath the sun. But new chat clients aren’t the only new added feature. Taking a cue from the iPhone’s lack of background apps, IM+ has a new IM push that allows you to close the chat program and still receive messages. It works by turning all of your chat messages into emails the email of the particular response in a conversation. The idea is to save battery life as while background apps make life much easier and efficient, they’re aren’t so nice to your little batter.
Whether Blackberry users who are use to everything at their finger tips RIGHT NOW will use a feature that requires several more steps and is in short an inconvenience *when forced upon you such as with the iPhone* remains to be seen.
There is one downside to this application thowever…the sky high price tag of $49.95…for a chat client. I completely understand and respect paying the developers what they deserve and what is due, but $50 is too much in my opinion. When I had my Blackberry I considered IM+ at one point as my multi-chat app of choice, however I just couldn’t find myself paying that price. Then along came BeeJive (formely JiveTalk), and I was in. *Sorry IM+ guys*. Both clients do the same thing…they just look a little different design wise. If IM+ were a more reasonable $10-$20 cheaper, I would have had a much harder time. That past decision has carried on as on my iPhone I now also have BeeJive.
In the end, no matter what the price is, someone will always be willing to pay for it. It is a matter of personal tastes and personal value. Is it worth it to you? If so, you can pick up your copy of IM+ in the Berry Review Store, or point your BB browser right over here for the OTA download.
Source: Berry Review, SHAPE Services
