Messenger on the Move

Here is how to stay connected with Internet contacts through your GPRS phone
I recall when I got myself a BlackBerry about three years back. I kept thinking of a way to chat with my teams using the phone. Time went by and in came Google Talk. There were other third party utilities which could do the same, but all of them wanted money.

There wasn’t much you could do if you were on a general GPRS phone and still wanted to use all your messengers. Well, finally, I have the answer for you and it is called Nimbuzz. But only if you are on a Symbian Series 60 phone—not iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile.
So, what is so special about Nimbuzz? After all, there are other players like IM+, Agile Messenger, E-buddy, and Fring which offer similar services. But I liked the Nimbuzz, and this is why.

I use ICQ, AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Skype and Facebook, as well as an internal chat messenger that runs on a protocol called Jabber for our corporate team. At times I carry my Skype phone with me so that I can make cheap International calls—with tarrifs falling, we may not have to do that much longer. But carrying so many phones can be tough and I have always wanted to move Skype to one of my phones, so that I could skip to Skype when I wanted and stick to GSM during the rest of the time.

Facebook chat, too, is becoming more of a necessity, as most of my school/college friends don’t use messengers. Moreover, I did not want to load too many applications on the phone and wanted to stick to a single application — on my computer I use Trillian for Windows, Pidgin for Linux and Adium on Mac to give me one list of all my contacts, irrespective of the messenger.

And this is exactly what Nimbuzz does for your phone, and that too for free. Nimbuzz even has a client for the PC, so your experience on Windows is no different than the one on your cellphone.
So, is it all good? Well, not really. The Edge/GPRS services in India are far below quality and they need to be improved drastically. At times my messenger conversations went missing, and at times I could not make Skype calls because of the poor GPRS/EDGE service. On the upside,...3G will soon be available in the country. And if your phone has Wi-Fi, you can use Nimbuzz to chat or make Skype calls over the wireless network.

There is some serious competition too. Ebuddy, which offers MySpace, Google, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL and MSN, though without Skype, is also free and hence the nearest competitor to Nimbuzz. IM+ offers all that Nimbuzz has to offer, minus MySpace and facebook, but only if you pay $29.95. Fring offers Skype, MSN, Google, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL and SIP (another VoIP Provider), but no Facebook and MySpace. But Fring is still in Beta, and we should see other things added to it.

For now, Nimbuzz is the best way to stay connected while on the move. Download Nimbuzz from nimbuzz.com, and as they claim, join mobile freedom.
To know if your phone is compatible see tinyurl.com/tech2-nimbuzz

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The article appeared in the Indian Express on Sunday 21st September 2008.