Yeigo version 2.2 has recently been made available for download and is now supported by more handsets than before … not least of which, my humble Nokia 6234.

It supports MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Jabber and recently QQ, skype and facebook. You can IM your friends from your cellphone with one client and connect VOIP calls where supported.

We put it through its paces and found it to be fast and extremely good looking. It does seem to require a certain measure of debugging still as the application crashes intermittently (normally JavaScript errors) and it took forever to authenticate all my IM accounts, but all-in-all my experience has been a good one.

My only real gripe with yeigo is still the cost of connecting VOIP calls. I recall from when I first downloaded yeigo lite, that call quality was exceptionally good (they give you free yeigo credits to try out the VOIP service when you first subscribe), but the whole idea of VOIP is to be affordable and their tariffs are higher than my regular rate for making cell-to-cell calls, so I fail to see any benefit to this service.

A good all-rounder and definitely one of my favorite mobile applications - just make it cheaper and I’ll buy your credits too. Thank you Andrew for the suggestion.

Well fring has finally got it together with minifring and now support a plethora of new mobile devices with their latest offering, but how does it compare to let’s say Yeigo lite (the general purpose version of Yeigo for phones that are not supported by the full version)? … not so well I’m afraid.

Firstly the name doesn’t really make an impact. I can understand that they couldn’t very well call it fring lite, because that would just sound too much like the aforementioned, but surely having the public submit suggestions and/or hosting a competition to help aid with a bit of brand awareness could have served them better on two counts.

The platform is easy enough to use though and support a number of IM clients including skype and to my knowledge it’s the only mobile platform that can boast that - so kudos where kudos are due, but sadly that’s where the pro’s end.

You will not be able to make VOIP calls from the mini version and hopefully that is just a temporary setback, because my experience of the full version on supported handsets (even at limited connectivity like GPRS) has left a good impression.

The biggest downside for me though was the speed - it is painfully slow. Updates are extremely fast so it does not seem to be a connectivity issue - the client just seems to require too much resources from my handset, hence switching between tabs/conversations sometimes takes forever.

All-in-all not a total failure I suppose - just give us more fring and less mini please.

So everyone seems to think that mobile internet and/or social networking is the next big thing and that we should all be looking toward the humble cellphone for our bread and butter if we are to survive in the big fish pond that is web development. For real?

While it is true that South Africa has a very high number of cellphone users (apparently our cellphone-to-person ratio is higher than anywhere in the world), we have to be aware of the fact that (like with PC users) most of these are not power users. Us bloggers and tech savvy types tend to weigh the world by what we see around us - which will be other tech savvy power users. In my experience, even the level of computer literacy amongst the general population is appalling.

I feel that our level of market penetration is also barred by poor and expensive connectivity, so we should realistically not expect this to improve anywhere in the near future. What I do believe though, is that even the less tech savvy are using the cellphone as a communication device in manners not quite covered in the instruction manual the device came with. Most people that I know are at least aware of the existence of skype, mxit and Facebook for instance. So in my humble opinion, if we are to move forward with mobile development we’ll have to raise awareness and user population of communications platforms before we’ll see the rest of the crowd moving out of their comfort zones and starting to experiment with all this wonderful alien technology (my mother has a cellphone, but still cannot send an SMS - she phones back and prompts you to get a piece of paper and a pen). What’s true for the rest of the world is unfortunately not true for South Africa. Hope springs eternal.

Going through the list of (essential) chat clients I have installed on my phone, you’ll find:

mxit is a home grown chat client that almost accidentally made it big in South Africa, thanks to it’s adoption by teens in there thousands … due mainly to the cost factor. They charge data only, so it costs around R0.01 per message. Recently upgraded, it now supports MSN and ICQ as well.
mxit home

skype is a popular PC VOIP client that recently went the mobile route and is in beta on selected handsets.
skype home

yeigo has been around for a while and incorporates gtalk, MSN, ICQ, AIM and Yahoo. The actual cost of VOIP calls is around the R1.40 mark, which means it’s (depending on your contract) cheaper to connect a cell call than going the VOIP route. The one thing that I must give the yeigo crowd kudos for though, is the fact they had sense enough to create a “Lite” version for users with handsets not compatible with their full client and I have yet to see what I am missing out on.
yeigo home

Enters fring. fring is the only client (to my knowledge) that supports the usual IM clients that most others do (MSN, gtalk, ICQ) with one trump card up their sleeves - they also support skype … in fact, most of their VOIP technology seems to be built around the skype client. It’s biggest drawback though is that they do not have a generic or lite version like yeigo does, meaning that it is only compatible with certain handsets (as luck will have it mine is not supported) … apparently this is a Symbian version issue.
fring home

When I was first alluded to the existence of mobimii, I was most excited, simply because this was the first client that had all the makings of a full-blown social network for mobile. Their initial IM client was called imii, but I see that they have just released the brand new mobimii and it is a social network and chat client all in one. Supports MSN, gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, qq, gadugadu (whatever the hell that might be - I’ll look into it and report back at a later stage) and *drumroll* now mxit.
mobimii home

This to me is the crux of this whole matter: for a mobile IM client (or any IM client for that matter) to really rule the roost, it’d need to support any/all other IM clients. This is particularly important on mobile devices, because we do not have the luxury of independent windows as we would on a PC; at best we can interrupt a service when receiving a call and carry on once the call is disconnected, but we cannot switch between IM clients mid-chat to answer an IM on a different client as we are able to do on a PC. I have different types of contacts in different age/social/business groups that each uses a different type of client best suited to their personality/lifestyle, so an IM client that can connect me across platforms makes me communicate more conveniently form one application.

Side note: the new mobimii has just launched, so I have not had the time to test all it’s features that extensively.
I’ll be giving a full report here in the very near future. Watch this space!!!

A quick revamp and a slight change of focus and we’re good to go again.

You’ll see that the blog is now the main site. It’ll take a while still before everything is perfect, but we’ll try our best to get our act together as soon as humanly possible.

Our focus will be on mobile development, devices and software and we’re hoping to be a valuable resource in time with important news from around the globe being highlighted here in the future - with everyone zeroing in on mobile development and considering it the next big thing.

Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you back soon.

Regards

the critter team