Tips & Tricks

NEW ICQ 4.0 Review

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Instant Messaging: ICQ Center

ICQ 4.0 Lite: First Impressions

Jeff Hester

ICQ has been around a long, long time and though not as popular in the U.S., it still has a huge community of loyal fans internationally.

ICQ 4.0 brings ICQ Lite up to par with the other big instant messengers, with an elegant new look-and-feel and new features like animated avatars and IM games -- new goodies that ICQ calls Xtraz.

The first thing you'll notice is a softer, rounded look to your ICQ contact list. Everything has a nice polish and looks new.

The Xtraz are available from a pull-out "drawer" that you can open or close whenever you need it. You'll also see Xtraz added to the chat window, making it easy to launch new activities with your chat partner.

Chat Interface

When you send someone an instant message, you see a new area for their display image or avatar. This area is can be closed to save space, as can the Xtraz bar on the left. The advertisement on the bottom is, unfortunately, fixed in place, but then it's been there for a while.

ICQ Image Gallery

You can select your own image, but there are also special animated images that respond to what you're typing. Send someone a smiley face, and your animated display image will smile.

The selection of images is not very extensive, and they all have a clip-art feel about them. Yahoo! Messenger 6 has done a better job with animated avatars, but for a first pass, this isn't bad.

Xtraz

Currently you can play games or send instant greeting cards, but new Xtraz can be programmed using an API promised to be offered by ICQ soon. This will allow third-party developers to create their own add-ons for ICQ. This level of support for third-party extensions is unprecedented, and while it remains to be seen what will come of it, this is an exciting area to watch.

Final Thoughts

If you use ICQ, I prefer ICQ 4.0 over ICQ Pro any day. It's a much more modern interface, and the features are in line with what most people expect from an instant messenger. Whether you use ICQ Pro, ICQ Lite or even AIM, you can still send and receive IMs across the network; 4.0 is fully compatible. If you're using ICQ, 4.0 is definitely worth the download.

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