Blackberry IM clients

I use a Blackberry 8800. I tried out a few free IM clients and found they didn't work for me. They only worked on one service each typically, they sent messages via SMS instead of through data channels, and they constantly went on and off line and pestered my connections letting them know as much.

I tried out IM+ and decided on that. I invested some time and figured out how to configure it as best as I could. Some nice things about it are it seems to be moderate in battery consumption, and you can start typing someone's name and it jumps to them in the list of buddies. On the downside, I couldn't configure the display of text in IMs to be as simple as I wanted, and scrolling up through an ongoing IM was laborious. A much greater problem, which I thought must really have just been a problem accross all phone IM programs was the interrupted connection. Unfortunately, with IM+, it sometimes looked like it was online, but in fact was not. I could see people were online, I could send messages, but in reality, I was not connected and my messages went nowhere.

I decided to give JiveTalk a try. It's battery consumption is pretty serious, comparatively. It does not have the easy way of getting to people in your buddy list. And it's notification of new messages isn't quite as nice as IM+. With IM+ an AJAX style display of a new message comes up over the application you're in. With JiveTalk it's usually a model dialog which must be clicked on to go away. On the plus side, the interface for the buddy list is really nice, I can make the text display as minimal as needed, and when it says it's connected, it is, when it's not, it's not. And it reconnects much better than IM+. With IM+ I found myself rebooting to get it to work, which was painful.

Neither program has terribly good chat history. Looking at a history you'll notice a number of missing entries, and the only way to get decent ones is if you were chatting via Gtalk and you can get them from Gmail.

I've decided on JiveTalk, as I think it's a big improvement over IM+. I'm really happy that I can do so much on my Blackberry, but I'm hopeful the development of these sort of application continues.