Webware

Palringo's the first multi-chat protocol app for the iPhone.

(Credit: Palringo)

The new iPhone app from Palringo brings an official multi-instant messaging client to the Apple device. It supports eight chat protocols and includes some useful iPhone-specific features, but also suffers from several irritating limitations.

Palringo can handle Apple iChat, AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Gadu Gadu, ICQ, Jabber, and Windows Live Messenger. Assuming you've got no problems with the iPhone keyboard, creating a profile for one of these accounts is as simple as selecting the proper icon and typing in your username and password. First, though, you must set up a Palringo account. Not to worry: when you open the Palringo app for the first time, it will redirect you to their Web site for registration.

When you receive a message, it gets dumped into the universal in-box at the bottom left corner of the screen. This may sounds chaotic, but I was surprised at how well it worked. The camera feature worked flawlessly, too. When you select a contact to chat with, tap the camera icon in the lower right corner and you can either take a fresh photo that will be instantly sent, or send an already-saved photo from your album.

However, do note that the photo gets uploaded to Palringo's servers and stored there for 10 days. Users must then download images to keep them. Click here to see the image that Jason Parker sent me from his iPhone.

Palringo offers a variety of status options, but no clear way to log out of one client.

(Credit: Palringo)

The big hang-up, if you'll forgive the pun, is that the app doesn't offer a way to sign out of an account once it's been created. You can change the status of an account to Invisible, Busy, or Away, with the default status being Online, but there's no way to be logged in to your AIM but not your ICQ.

Also, since the iPhone can currently use only one app at a time, you must be running the app to receive new messages. The phone vibrates when it does, but that won't do you much good without having the app always on. The promised voice-chat feature has yet to be implemented, too.

Even with these drawbacks, for people who don't have a jailbroken phone Palringo offers a solid and Apple-approved way to get access to all your IMs at once.

Yahoo is set to release a preview of Yahoo Messenger for Vista on Thursday.

It's just a preview, or a very early version, so it doesn't have all the features other versions of Yahoo Messenger do, such as voice, Webcam, chat rooms, text messaging to mobile phones, easy photo sharing and conferencing. Those features will come later.

What it does have is a new interface, and it lets you organize conversations into tabs and drag and drop tabs out to create a new window. You can also keep favorite contacts by dragging them into the Windows Sidebar gadget, send enhanced emoticons, change the color of IM windows, adjust the display size of the contacts, arrange your contact list into multiple columns, and send files as large as 2 gigabytes.

"We know it's been a long wait for Yahoo Messenger for Vista and we can't thank you enough for your patience," says Josh Jacobson, senior product manager for Yahoo Messenger for Vista.

Yahoo offers preview for Yahoo Messenger for Vista users.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Jubii is a new service that attempts to provide an all-in-one solution for Web communication and sharing. It combines e-mail, contact management, instant messaging, VoIP, and file hosting into one app. The big question is, whether combining these things together provides a cohesive solution that's better than individual Web services. In short, the answer is no.

Jubii centers around its e-mail platform, which uses a simple tabbed interface with two separate in-boxes. E-mails from people on your approved contact list automatically get sent to your private box, whereas others make their way straight to the public. Creating new e-mails is fairly easy, but there's no way to search through old messages. Instead Jubii uses tags, which is great for photos, just not with words. Assuming you're willing to tag every piece of mail or correspondence you get, it might work, but that's quite an assumption and will never work as well as full contextual searching like you get with Google's Gmail.

Jubii's other hook is as a file sharing service. You're given 4GB of free storage as your own virtual drive (10GB if you're one of the first million to sign up). You can share these files with other Jubii members or send a download link to non-Jubii members via e-mail.

The IM client in Jubii looks fairly straightforward, but it wasn't turned on for our testing account. It's all based around a contact list, which is linked to your e-mail. Like Google's Gmail Talk client and Yahoo IM, your buddy list resides in the corner and provides status icons for Jubii users when they're online. If you don't feel like typing, there is a built-in VoIP telephony service. It can be accessed from your e-mail in-box and provides free landline to landline telephone calls during the beta.

Jubii is an interesting idea but essentially it's been done before either by other e-mail services or Web file storage companies, just not in one place. Jubii wants you to give up your current services for them, but there's a lack of cohesion, which makes it a tough sell. With collaborations like Zoho and Omnidrive, and Google increasingly integrating Web services, it's hard to imagine switching to something that doesn't already tie into half a dozen tools. Maybe Jubii will get like that someday, but it's not there yet.

(Credit: CNET Networks)