It looks like a number of developers are stepping up to the iPhone IM challenge, and after the middling attempts of meebo, eBuddy and Trillian last week it's the turn of beejive with their free open-alpha release of JiveTalk for iPhone. Already behind a number of IM clients for BlackBerry and other platforms, beejive's latest allows you to sign in to AIM, iChat, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber simultaneously.
Read on to find out what Vincent thought of JiveTalk...
First for the good news: despite being a mere alpha release, the vast majority of JiveTalk functions work as expected. Vincent had no trouble accessing his IM accounts - with the exception of Google Talk, which refused to play ball - and it was responsive and relatively easy to flick between pages. Since it uses the iPhone's data connection you're not paying for text messages either.
The experience as a whole was marred by occasional connection errors, however, with JiveTalk sometimes refusing to access services. Still, for an alpha and with the latest Trillian being an invite-only game at the moment, it looks like beejive has taken the lead for IM on the iPhone.
So far this one is the best I’ve used. I still have complaints about not having sound when a new im is received, etc. And if you want to go out and look on your calendar it doesn’t have alerts pop up. I don’t know if that is even possible (probably not) but this one is still the best so far. My AIM, YahooIM, Google Talk, and MSN names all worked just fine! :) Of course I haven’t tried to talk to any of my contacts in all of them, just AIM. But that works great in my oppinion. And Apple or AT&T won’t lose any texting revenue from me because IM doesn’t replace texting for me. There are still people that you can’t IM, you can only text. And if people really wanted to avoid paying for text messages they could just CALL people instead, that’s what I used to do. But my husband and I both have the 1500 text plan so there’s no problem there.