iPhone Atlas

Palringo's the first multi-chat protocol app for the iPhone.

(Credit: Palringo)

The new iPhone app from Palringo brings an official multi-instant messaging client to the Apple device. It supports eight chat protocols and includes some useful iPhone-specific features, but also suffers from several irritating limitations.

Palringo can handle Apple iChat, AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Gadu Gadu, ICQ, Jabber, and Windows Live Messenger. Assuming you've got no problems with the iPhone keyboard, creating a profile for one of these accounts is as simple as selecting the proper icon and typing in your username and password. First, though, you must set up a Palringo account. Not to worry: when you open the Palringo app for the first time, it will redirect you to their Web site for registration.

When you receive a message, it gets dumped into the universal in-box at the bottom left corner of the screen. This may sounds chaotic, but I was surprised at how well it worked. The camera feature worked flawlessly, too. When you select a contact to chat with, tap the camera icon in the lower right corner and you can either take a fresh photo that will be instantly sent, or send an already-saved photo from your album.

However, do note that the photo gets uploaded to Palringo's servers and stored there for 10 days. Users must then download images to keep them. Click here to see the image that Jason Parker sent me from his iPhone.

Palringo offers a variety of status options, but no clear way to log out of one client.

(Credit: Palringo)

The big hang-up, if you'll forgive the pun, is that the app doesn't offer a way to sign out of an account once it's been created. You can change the status of an account to Invisible, Busy, or Away, with the default status being Online, but there's no way to be logged in to your AIM but not your ICQ.

Also, since the iPhone can currently use only one app at a time, you must be running the app to receive new messages. The phone vibrates when it does, but that won't do you much good without having the app always on. The promised voice-chat feature has yet to be implemented, too.

Even with these drawbacks, for people who don't have a jailbroken phone Palringo offers a solid and Apple-approved way to get access to all your IMs at once.

Your Meebo buddy list is now finger friendly, and easy on the eyes.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This morning Meebo is releasing a freshly updated version of their chat app for the iPhone. The new iteration is more finger-friendly, requiring none of that pinching nor chat window management of the previous version--which was admittedly a quick fix to accommodate early adopters of Apple's handset. Gone is the classic desktop feel of Meebo, which has been replaced by a simple buddy list that takes up the entire screen, and can be perused with one finger. To begin a chat, simply click on somebody's name. It's very intuitive.

With this latest version, Meebo has done something really cool by pulling up the last few lines of your last conversation, assuming you were using Meebo as your client. Likewise, your saved Meebo away messages are there, along with a spiffy new status changer that lets you choose them from a wheel.

All in all, the update is a nice addition to the lineup of IM apps for the iPhone. I'm still partial to Mundu's offerings, which I believe to be the best of the bunch, but already we've come a long way in a short time towards removing the need for client-side IM apps.

More shots of the new interface after the jump.

Amid the growing group of instant-messaging solutions for the IM-less iPhone, Mundu (a Webware 100 winner) has just released a new contender that handles four of the most popular chatting protocols with a fantastic interface. If you're an iPhone user, just navigate your Safari browser to http://iphone.mundu.com, which takes you to a log-in screen with access to your AIM, Yahoo, MSN, .Mac, and Google Talk accounts. You can log into all of them simultaneously, although there's no master password system like you get with Meebo.

Each client gets its own buddy list, and any additional conversations get their own tabs. To start a conversation, just tap a user name of one of your friends who is logged in. There's a simple form that pulls up the iPhone's keyboard when clicked. Similar to the iPhone's built-in SMS app and iChat, conversations show up as color-coded speech bubbles that can be scrolled back and forth with your finger. The refresh rate is also instantaneous, so you don't have to keep reloading the page to see new comments from your friends.

The whole app has a very organic feel that's just right. It's one of the few IM apps I've used on the iPhone where it doesn't feel like you're fighting an interface to make it feel like a desktop app. I also have to give Mundu credit for creating a neat bubbly effect on the chat tab when you've got an unread message. Sometimes it's just the little things that make Web apps more fun to use. In this case, the function is just as good as the form.

Mundu's IM client for the iPhone is slick and fun to use.

(Credit: Mundu.com)

eBuddy is a strange mix of a typical Web company. While the lowercase "e" in front of the name might suggest it's a survivor of the early 1990s dot-com boom, it actually started out in 2003 and resides not in the Silicon Valley, but Amsterdam. It's also one of the few companies I've seen that has put almost its entire press kit on Flickr. eBuddy specializes in Web-based IM, which might sound familiar if you've ever used Meebo or the Web version of your favorite chat client. eBuddy works with three of the major clients, including AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. The latest release, which came earlier this month, runs all three at once.

IM on your iPhone, with eBuddy.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Besides running on your browser, in the last two months eBuddy has been moving into the mobile space. It has a handy Java-based client that will run in nearly every phone, along with a version you can point to with your mobile browser. Just a few days ago this mobile version was optimized for the iPhone in order to get it to work with the Safari browser.

I spent a few minutes with it this morning, and came away impressed. iPhone users get a scrollable buddy list and tabbed chat windows. The buddy text is easy to read, and if you need to come in closer you can simply pinch. Instead of relying on a scroll bar to browse through your contacts, you just hold two fingers to drag it up or down. This worked some of the time, but more often it would simply scroll the entire page instead. You can also use this two-fingered scroll to read the contents of an IM conversation.

The chat interface itself is really simple, including the input box, which gives you a rather large selection of emoticons in case you feel like skipping the typing. If you need to jump back to the buddy list, you can do it from any window, which is helpful. All in all, it's a very simple solution for IMing on the go, and one of the better ones I've seen thus far.

Related: iPhone IM arms race ramping up; Trillian coming soon

We got word earlier today the team behind Meebo has feverishly been working since last Friday to get it working on Apple's iPhone. One of the handset's shortcomings is its lack of an instant messaging client. Meebo, which has been providing a Web-based IM client that mimics desktop chatting software, did not work come iPhone launch due to the mobile version of Safari using its double-tap navigation. Meebo requires double clicking to start up an IM conversation, and many of the buttons and window functionality were simply not working.

The result is what the Meebo team claims to be a "pre-alpha workaround" which lets users select people off their IM buddy lists with a succession of finger taps, similar to "sticky" keys. This will open up an IM window that functions quite similarly to the desktop experience, sans some screen real estate. Users were also previously unable to hit the enter key, keeping them from being able to respond, despite having entered text.

The system is still far from perfect or as iChat beautiful as the iPhone's SMS app. It's difficult to swap between IM windows without zooming out, and even harder to keep track of what's going on in a conversation since you can't read and type at the same time. Regardless, the iPhone's only been out for a few days, and considering what some others have done in that timespan, it's likely people will get their mobile IM fix soon enough.

Save those text messages! IM on your iPhone for free using Meebo.

(Credit: CNET Networks)