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Instant Messaging on Your iPhone

Want to get true instant messaging on your iPhone while you’re away from your computer? Try a third-party instant messaging client.

AIM AOL’s iPhone app remains one of the best IM clients on the iPhones. Though it’s limited to the AIM network, it displays your entire buddy list, lets you carry on multiple conversations, and lets you change your online status. Although apps can’t run in the background, you can set AIM to keep you online when you quit the application. If you have Push Notification turned on,  AIM will alert you to any new messages you receive, even though the program is off.

BeejiveIM This iPhone app offers a lot to justify its $10 price tag. It supports multiple services, including Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, and you can even log on to multiple accounts at one time and see all of your buddies in one list. Beejive lets you send and receive pictures and other files, and chatting has support for both portrait and landscape orientations. Like AIM, Beejive supports push nitifications.

Mobile AIM Another alternative is AOL’s Mobile AIM Service, which can automatically forward standard iChat and AIM messages to your iPhone as SMS messages. This arrangement works reasonably well, but has some significant drawbacks. First, it takes longer to send and receive SMS messages, and your messages count against your monthly SMS quota. Second, you can’t use the service to initiate chat on your iPhone, you can only respond to chats that others initiate. Finally, messages you receive via Mobile AM won’t come directly from you buddiesl rather, they’ll appear to come from various gateway numbers. This means that in the iPhone’s Text Program, each Mobile AIM chat will apera in a different conversation entry

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