Last week at CTIA, Yahoo released Yahoo! Mobile and announced Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone. Well, now the popular instant messenger is officially available for download via iTunes.
The new iPhone application is available for free and gives you basic instant messaging capability with a few nice extras. Of course, you can see who is online and chat with your friends. You can also share photos, or view an archive of recent conversations.
Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone also has a special idle state, so if you answer a phone call you will continue to receive IMs. As long as you return to Yahoo! Messenger within 10 minutes, you can pick up your conversations right where you left off. It's not quite running in the background, but it's a nice extra until Apple provides the long promised push notifications sometime this summer.
It's interesting that Yahoo! now has three applications available for the iPhone that all give you the ability to send and receive IMs on the Yahoo! Messenger network: this app, OneConnect and Yahoo! Mobile. They all have a slightly different flavor, but it seems that Yahoo! needs to sort out their iPhone strategy.
Note that unlike it's desktop siblings, Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone will let not you chat with your Windows Live Messenger (formerlly MSN) contacts. For that, you need a multi-network program like BeeJive, IM+ or Palringo. But if you primarily use Yahoo! Messenger and don't need to connect to other IM networks, this app should suit you well.
Useful Links
Thanks to our forum member Youngistaan for the tip!
gerald castro says
hi guys,
please allow me to have an instant messaging with out down loading coz iPod touch couldn’t down load anything, I will just add it in my home page.
thankzz guyZzz.
more power.
Jeff Hester says
Gerald, there is already a good, no-download instant messenger that works with AIM, Yahoo, MSN and more. On your iPod Touch, just point your browser to http://www.meebo.com/iphone/ and you’re good to go!