vB Easy Archive - My P900 AIM Client Experiences

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My P900 AIM Client Experiences
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Posted by: Elliot.Turner

I've been toying around with various AOL Instant Messenger clients for the Sony Ericsson P900. This post contains information on what I've seen (good, and bad) when attempting to use the various IM clients that are currently available.

Disclaimer: The information in this post reflects my personal experiences with these AIM clients. You may have worse luck, or better luck, depending on your phone firmware revision, GPRS provider, or any number of other factors.

InstantSymbian 2004: This is the only AIM client that I've found to work on a reliable basis on my phone. It consistently has no problems connecting to the AIM servers, retrieving my server-side buddy list, etc. My main complaints for this client are as follows:

1. Inability to send a regular IM message (must invite someone to a chat room first). This is very annoying. If you want to send an instant message to someone on your buddy list, the client first invites them into a chat room. Once they join this chat room, you'll be able to send an instant message. If they don't join (ie they're idle) you can't send them a message. Being able to send a message to someone even when they're idle is one of the great things about AIM. Requiring this extra step (joining a chat room) is annoying and tedious.

2. Limit of 3 open chat rooms. Using this client you are unable to chat in more than three separate conversations.

3. Minor stability problems with multiple open chat windows, related to losing the ability to type into the edit entrybox. Sometimes when either the other party leaves a chat room, or I manually close a chat room window, my other open chat rooms lose the ability for me to click in the text entrybox area for writing additional instant messages. The only way to get this problem to go away is to close the affected chat room window and open a new window.

IM+: IM+ didn't work for me. It seemed to succeed in connecting to the AIM server and retrieving my server-side buddy list, as the "Offline Users" section of the Roster showed everyone in my buddy list. However, thats as far as it got, not ever successfully logging in or retrieving my active buddies. Multiple uninstall/reinstall attempts did not seem to alleviate the issue.

Agile Messenger: Worked on occasion. Very unreliable for connecting to the AIM network servers. It would get past the "connecting to central server" screen and then hang on the "connecting to AIM" screen. It successfully connected on a few ocassions, and was able to retrieve my server-side buddy list and allow instant messages to be sent or received.

Tipic: Tipic is actually a Jabber client, but it is capable of connecting to AIM using a Jabber proxy. This client seems relatively robust and stable, offering auto-reconnection features, etc. I was able to utilize AIM several times using this client, however the issue seemed more with the publicly available Jabber->AIM proxies than the client itself. While I had alot of success connecting to ICQ through proxy servers, the AIM support seemed very spotty and unreliable. The same behavior was experienced when using a Win32 Jabber client (Exodus) so I definitely don't think this was Tipic-related.

Summary: I'm currently using InstantSymbian 2004 for AIM purposes. None of the other solutions were reliable enough on my phone to be of much use. InstantSymbian works, but the chat room limitation is irritating. It would also be nice to see whether users in the buddy list are currently idle (through italic text or a different font) as there is currently no way to identify whether someone is idle in this client.

I've heard of others having luck with IM+ and other clients, so as I mentioned before these are only the experiences that I've had on my particular phone, using the AT&T Wireless GPRS service.

Regards,

Elliot

Posted by: Kingamir45

IM+ is the real deal... very good program...
Word of caution.. stay away from any and all Handango IM Clients, they are not properly designed and its a 50/50 chance of the damn thing working right... oh yeah.. forgot to mention that buyers remorse is not an option..

Good Luck..

Posted by: pinoy

Wirelessly posted (SonyEricssonP900/R101 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0)

i like agiLe

Posted by: azeter

can u give me the link for this software please .will it work fine on my p900??????????

Posted by: sdsviet

i have used agile messenger and im+ here is wat i think of it.

agile messenger:

im happy that agile messenger is free but in its userbility it was very unreliable to me. it had a tendency to crash and there seems to be a program error where the bottom of the interface u can see through to the previous program or section u were using. i was able to connect successfully but then i couldnt message anybody. i couldnt find a way to just message them for some reason. there was also no way to add or delete sn either. so i had to find something else.

im+:

i was able to find a site to dl im+ and i have to say that even with a few buggy errors the program itself is pretty good. i was always able to connect successfully and the interface on it is so much better than agile messenger. the only on the interface i didnt like is that it put all the sn's starting in alphabetical order first with sn's that has the first letter in their sn in big caps and then alphabetical order for the sn's in small caps. i wish it just put it in the groups that how it is on the original buddy list. some of the errors are that sometimes if i try to add a new sn it would crash on me and show this im+ code error. it also does this from time to time when trying to remove sn's. another quirk i have with it is that when new buddies sign on there's the open door sound that goes off, i wish there was a way in the interface for me to turn it off. but only way for me is to turn my phone volume off. overall the program works great and u send people msgs even if they are away and there away msgs pops right back to u. also it would be nice to tell who's away or not.

@eliot.

sometimes when i turn on im+ it just shows my offline list but when i go in and click hide offline, the offline goes away and the online starts showing up. maybe if u try that and see if it works. also maybe u dont have the most updated version. who's knows just a long shot.