Sending Instant Messages Now Goes Mobile

Distance is no longer an impediment to keeping in touch with friends and loved ones with the increasing popularity of instant messaging. With several service providers such as Yahoo!, MSN, and ICQ, instant messaging is now becoming a hit not only with computer users but for mobile phone users as well. These mobile phones are equipped with Java and internet connectivity that can make instant messaging quite real. The only hassle encountered with sending messages via the mobile phone is the small screen and keypad. Fortunately, mobile phone manufacturers have given solutions to this problem by providing phones with bigger screens or attaching a QWERTY keypad on it. Another downside of sending instant messages is that there is a fee for using the internet like the case of Agile Messenger whose Symbian operating system is not considered freeware.

Wireless Village or OMA IMPS is the technology giving these mobile phones the ability to send and receive instant messages. For phones by Sony Ericsson, it is the My Friends feature that is accessed; the Nokia has My Presence and Motorola, IM. A problem with this is the polling system since there is the need for server connection every couple of minutes to be able to get new messages or contact status online, a delay is seen between the messages received. The smaller the interval between connections means a lesser delay, and yet with higher costs on usage.

This technology has already been developed earlier and yet not everyone makes use of it probably because the service providers do not have a service assigned to it. Free websites such as www.smartvas.com and www.yamigo.com can be used over other methods which can be used as a background feature for sending messages. Unfortunately, all the names and numbers of contacts that you wish to contact via this website have to be added manually although there are now programs to do it automatically.

There is also another technology to make instant messenger simpler, the Jabber technology. It allows a user to be connected to several instant messengers at the same time, using a single server and a client. It stores usernames and passwords of all the network providers it is connected with. Login is through Jabber. It can be availed of using www.jabber.nu with a lot of builds for their client. A specific requirement of Jabber is a TCP socket support, which is not available on the older models.

For solely an internet capable mobile phone, the E-messenger may help. It uses a wap browser on the mobile phone via the mob.e-messenger.net although it is for MSN only at the moment.

The next step to this is the creation of a static IP internet connection that a mobile phone user can run to be able to connect to the internet. This is to lower down costs from the usage of internet as well as data transfer between them.

These methods do not charge anything for the service it provides although the experience that mobile chatting or instant messaging provides is quite different from using the computer for instant messaging.