Palringo has been under my radar for a while, so the time has arrived to give it a deeper look and to try it out on my Nokia N95. Palringo is a UK-based company and his CEO, Kerry Ritz, is the former general manager of Vonage UK.
In a nutshell, Palringo is a multi platform rich IM client which lets you share text messages as well as voice and picture messages with your contacts across a wide range of IM networks and services. Palringo is available for Windows, Mac OSX Leopard, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone (via the iTunes App Store).
Palringo offers an easy way to share something with your contacts. You can shot a photo with your camera phone and send it to your contacts immediately or you can record a short vocal message and share it with your friends, without the need to make a real phone call.
The installation on my N95 has been very easy. I downloaded the .sisx file on my MacBook then I sent it to my N95 through the bluetooth connection. After I insterted my userid and password (you need to sign up on their website first) the client immediately got connected to the Palringo server.
The interface is clean and very well designed. Among the available services, I added GoogleTalk and immediately all my contacts were available on my mobile.
The chat window is very simple and I found out that it’s not that easy to distinguish between your own messages and those from the contact you are chatting with. A different color would have helped here.
When you are interacting with a contact, the “push to talk” feature as well as the “share a picture” option are available. The push to talk works like a walkie-talkie, you keep the button of your phone pressed until you record a new message which is immediately delivered to your contact. For a picture the story is similar. Really straightforward.
The overall experience with this mobile client has been really positive so I decided to try the MacOSX version as well. I didn’t expect to find an impressive client here, since it’s an alpha version and it’s too young to compete with other IM clients like Adium o iChat itself. Despite my initial thoughts and the client crashed after I loaded it the first time, I have to say I was impressed by this Mac version. You realize it is an alpha, but it is enough to start with.
All that said, mine is definitely a thumb up for Palringo. I expect to see more sharing options available in the near future and I bet there is something going on behind the scenes in terms of business agreements with mobile operators as well as handset vendors. In addition, I see plugins for the most popular IM clients for Windows and Mac (when an Adium plugin?) a more viable option than a stand alone client that is going to compete with all the very popular and widely used IM clients available for those platforms.
Next step? I look forward to trying the iPhone version out, where the user experience promises to be even better.
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