No More PalmOS Instant Messaging?

cloudscout asks: "Palm users are slowly being cut off from Instant Messaging networks. In July of 2002, changes to the Yahoo! Messenger network effectively disabled the service's PalmOS client and an updated version was never released. Now the same fate has befallen ICQ users. Changes to the ICQ network have disabled the PalmOS client. This happened in September and since then, ICQ has responded to all bug reports with an irrelevant form letter. This leaves Palm users with AIM whose official client is a couple of years old, buggy and costs $20. Is there a future for Instant Messaging on Palm? One would think that the growing popularity of PalmOS SmartPhones would make this a priority."

Comments

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would IM on cells be a priority?

1st - it's not a cell, it is palm os.
2nd - we don't all have cells.
3rd - it's hard to send sms through wlan or bluetooth.

Re:Why?

[DAldredge]

Dumbass. Try reading the last line of the post.

" One would think that the growing popularity of PalmOS SmartPhones would make this a priority."

Does that help?

Re:Open Source Opertunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you've never heard of Waste distributed, encrypted instant messaging.

There's no technical reason why *any* new internet service could not be built in an entirely cross-platform P2P distributed way - including IM.

Every one would be using it already if the big, stupid networks (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ) didn't have such a stranglehold on the user share - none of *my* friends are going to switch, so I can't either if I still want to message them.

AIM for Palm OS

[btornado]

AIM for Palm OS is still available for free on AOL's UK site. I downloaded it today and installed it. It works, but it did not load my buddy list.

Re:/obvious?

[sycotic]

There sure are, checkout this google result for instance

I would have thought someone would go that before posting a question to slashdot.. Google says there are "..about 4,680. Search took 1.88 seconds."

You can use Yahoo!, ICQ, MSN & AOL chat

[$exyNerdie]

Well, from what I know, VeriChat(TM) Unified Instant Messaging (IM) application for SmartPhones and other connected Palm devices such as the Tungsten C works very well.

It's key features (copied and pasted from the website) are:

- Unified messaging support for Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger & MSN Instant Messenger
- Works with all PalmOS based SmartPhones (that have a data connection - circuit-switch data or high-speed data) including the Treo 180, Treo 270, Treo 300, Samsung I330, Kyocera 7135, Tungsten W, Samsung I500, VisorPhone, etc.
- Native support for the Palm Tungsten C and the Sony NX/NZ series with a WiFi card.
- Will also work with your Palm PDA if it has any type of Internet connection and a paging address. You can use a Wireless phone via IR (infra-red) or BlueTooth for the PDA's internet connectivity, i.e., a Tungsten-T or a Treo 90 coupled via blue-tooth with a Ericsson T68. You can also use your Palm coupled to a CDPD modem and your alphanumeric pager.
- Familiar Graphical icons for each protocol
Chat simultaneously with your buddies using one or any combination of IM protocols
- "Always On" on the messaging networks: Your buddies will see you as online even when you are not in the VeriChat(TM) application
- Specially customized for the Treo's Keyboard and Jog dial; you can avoid using the stylus altogether if you wish to
- Easy setup; the installation wizard will guide you through the configuration
- Many features especially for a mobile device: Buddy Pounce, Auto-reply messages, Custom Status messages and Pre-defined messages.

There is another application called Chatter that works on Palm OS 5 based Treo 600 called Chatter. It's website is here.

Re:Open Source Opportunity

[the_truk_stop]

why not have someone work on a ... version of Gaim

The Gaim developers have done a fantastic job of splitting the Gaim core from the user interface, which has already resulted in a PDA client for the QTopia environment called QPE-Gaim. But porting Gaim to PalmOS I assume is a much bigger task.

libyahoo2 is currently broken as well

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the client freehoo, and as you can see, it's currently not working because Yahoo changed the protocol. Now we get to scramble about trying to fix it.

I happen to have made the mistake of letting several of my clients get in the habit of being able to contact me via Yahoo IM. I won't be doing that again. When freehoo quite working, I tried a number of other clients, and then had to go to the binary-only client Yahoo distributes; this required a newer libc6 and I ended up apt-get upgrading half the packages on my main machine and now some of my tools won't compile anymore.

I need to find a command line only client like freehoo but for Jabber, or else start running my own Zephyr server again. My business has picked up enough that I don't need to bend to my clients choice of communication -- a potentially pleasant evening blown scrambling about fixing shit is a high price to pay for a "free" service.

You want something done right, do it yourself. I can't let that kind of stuff be dependent on Yahoo. This reminds me of when they announced they would start charging for pop access to the email; they said they would start charging by a certain time, so I started looking around at alternatives, and then pop suddenly quit working well before the announced date. I don't need these kind of people fucking up my life.

Re:Jabber

[Evilive]

Chatopus is a jabber client written specifically for PalmOS.

Tungsten T maintains the connection between apps

[Eustace Tilley]

The Tungsten T lets you set the idle timeout on a network connection to 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, or never. You decide the trade off between battery time and reconnection hassle. If you set it to "never," you can switch between WebPro, VersaMail, WordSmith, PhotoBase, and so forth without having to re-login. If you set it to "1 minute," you can still switch, but you mustn't dillydally. Perhaps the Tungsten C lacks that preference setting, or perhaps the original poster never noticed.

The advantages to using a Tungsten T + cellphone combination over a single device like a Tungsten C include:

• it works whereever your cellphone can find GPRS, not just in WiFi HotSpots
• your cellphone battery handles the radio between you and the station (distant), your PDA battery handles the radio between your PDA and your cellphone (close)

Re:future of palm os...

[MountainLogic]

I've been working woth the Palm OS for several year and I very much enjoy working with it. Metrowerks has a professional quality C/C++ environment for it and Palm has released a free (as in beer )simulator that allows for source level debugging. There are several frameworks and other tools that make the Palm OS specific issues a snap. It really is a joy to work wehere thing just work - No driver issues, no incompatabilities, etc. Palm programming does require a very different mindset from the desktop. The Palm OS is very lean, but that is how it should be. Bloated palms are an ugly thing indeed.

Re:future of palm os...

[RevAaron]

Yes, PalmOS 5.2.x allows a very limited form of multitasking. As far as I know, it is limited to MP3 or other audio players. On these versions of PalmOS, there are two threads allowed- foreground and background. I don't know of any apps other than a couple audio players that use this capability, though I imagine a couple other apps use it.

Sony added similar very limited multitasking to their versions of PalmOS, somewhere in the 4 series. I think they use the POS 5 API now, though.

For it to be used to allow networking apps not to suck, PalmsSource or the licensee would have to rewrite the networking system to use it.