Hot on the heels of Fring for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Palringo has announced an update, as well. Yet another free multi-protocol instant messaging client, and free, to boot. We’ve covered Palringo here in the past – it’s certainly grown up from those first releases. The new interface translates very nicely into S60 5th Edition, with nice, finger-friendly buttons and entry points.
You can connect to a handful of popular IM services, such as MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, and even Jabber accounts. Gtalk is supposedly supported, but I can’t, for some reason, get that to connect. The newest addition, which has me excited, is support for Facebook chat! This is apparently still in alpha mode, so might be buggy, but it’s cool to see, nonetheless. Yu can see in the screenshots how the nice large buttons make it easy to use, and the contact list shows all of my friends across the various services that I’m connected to.
I do have 2 complaints, though. First, while it was easy to use my finger to select the Contacts or Groups tabs, the Palringo main tab was incredibly difficult, since you can see it’s only their symbol. There is obviously plenty of space, perhaps future versions could say, ‘Palringo’ (with the P still being the symbol), to offer a larger space to tap. The other complaint is the lack of Skype chat.
Palringo also supports voice chat (sending audio clips, basically) and file transfer, though I’ve not much use for either of those on my phone, personally. There is also a location feature, which Dotsisx checked out previously, and found wanting. The only other free multiple IM-client for the 5800 XpressMusic, SlickIM from LonelyCatGames, has a poor user interface (not finger friendly at all) and doesn’t currently support Facebook chat, so Palringo is definitely the leader on S60 5th Edition, currently. I would like to see integration with say, Twitter and Skype, ultimately.
What networks would you like to be able to connect to?
