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No More PalmOS Instant Messaging?

Posted by Cliff on from the put-down-your-styluses dept.

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."

4 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. /obvious? by cheezus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm too lazy to look, but I'd imagine that like every every other platform, there are 3rd party IM clients, perhaps even multi-protocol ones

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  2. Open Source Opertunity by MBCook · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sounds like an opertunity for OSS to me. Why not have someone work on a (I assume scaled down) versoin of GAIM or something like that. Is there something preventing a good OSS client (like some problem with the networking APIs that are exposed) or is this just a lack of work (people have been putting up with official clients so there was no "want" for 3rd party software)?

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  3. Re:MSN Messenger and Pocket PCs? by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I think it's exceedingly unlikely that Microsoft could bribe their biggest competitors in the IM field, especially AOL.

    (Well, you asked)

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  4. Jabber, and its derivatives. by Jorkapp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A quick google search for "open source palmos instant messenger" comes up with - you guessed it - Jabber. Unfortunately, Jabber has not officially developed a PalmOS client, so here's a few promising 3rd party clients based on Jabber.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/jabberpalm/

    The Jabber Palm project. By the looks of it, it's a solid client, and only a few notable bugs to work out.

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    http://www.chatopus.com/

    Chatopus. A Jabber based client for PalmOS. Offers a good amount of features and support. Last version release was 01/12/04, so those -changes- in the networks shouldn't be a problem.

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