Our Verdict
Instant messaging ’s been a part of my aliveness since I first create an AOL Instant Messenger account back in 1996 . Nowadays I practice it to keep in touch with both far - flung champion and colleague . As it ’s a personal societal tool and a necessity for work , it ’s the kind of matter that I like to have access to no issue where I am . AOL ’s barren AIM customer for the iPhone ( ) is fairly good , but for those in search of a more powerful alternative there’sBeejiveIMfromBeejive .
BeejiveIM is an implausibly full - featured IM client , boast capabilities that almost put it on par with desktop IM clients . For me , its biggest advantage over the AIM node are its compatibility with multiple IM service , such as AIM , Yahoo Messenger , MSN Messenger , GoogleTalk , ICQ , Jabber , and even MySpace , and its power to let you lumber in to multiple IM accounts at the same time .
The Missing Link : BeejiveIM lets you assign material lifetime names to your crony , but it does n’t link them up automatically .
The Missing Link: BeejiveIM lets you assign real life names to your buddies, but it doesn’t link them up automatically.
Since I use IM for both oeuvre and personal rationality , I hold two disjoined accounts , but I ’m usually logged on with both . In AOL ’s AIM customer for the iPhone , swop accounts is a hassle that requires quit the lotion , going to the iPhone ’s preferences app and changing the login credentials manually . Beejive let me infix login data for multiple account and I have control over them either separately or as a group — say , if I want to modify my status content .
Beejive ’s buddy inclination can display contacts in several unlike ways , including expose group , sort by display name or status , and hiding offline contact . By tapping on the More button on the bottom toolbar , you’re able to also consider just the contacts for a certain account or grouping . touch can be pit as Favorites , which lets you view them by tap the Favorites push on the toolbar , like to the iPhone ’s Phone app . you could also search your buddy list by tapping the magnifying glass ikon at the top left-hand and enroll a lookup term .
regrettably , even though Beejive does let you associate a buddy with a tangency in your Address Book , such links must be made manually , by bringing up the pal ’s profile , tap Link to Address Book Card , and pick out a contact . Even then , it does n’t assort the person ’s real name with the account — you’ll still see their screen - name unless you take the sentence to rap on the Nickname field in their visibility and enter a friendlier recording label . Once you ’ve link an Address Book contact with the profile , you may tap a button to take in the card , which move like the iPhone ’s contact app : you may tap an email destination to launch Mail and station that person a message or a telephone set number to start a call .
When it comes to jaw , Beejive offer a figure of powerful characteristic : you could post icon and legal recordings to your buddies ; you could also send an e - chain armour containing a logarithm of the chat . The monetary value of packing in all these features , however , is an often confusing and unintuitive port . Beejive opted to just hide many parts of the user interface . For model , the controls for memorialise a voice snippet or select a film are only approachable when you ’re in a chat ; that ’s fine , but there ’s no obvious button to trigger them . Instead , you require to wiretap the name of the person you ’re chatter with at the top of the silver screen and a lucid control panel slides down with additional controls . But there ’s no optic clew to indicate that there ’s more functionality hide there , and no way of know that they ’re potential without reading the instructions on Beejive ’s Web land site . It ’s a by all odds un - iPhone - like chemical mechanism .
Chatting can be similarly confusing . While the user interface ’s colourful dialogue balloon mimic iChat and the iPhone ’s SMS app , there is no obvious text edition field for composing messages . Instead , you have to tap on the the screenland to bring up the keyboard , and then you need to take up typing in ordering to bring up a unearthly translucent balloon that expose what you ’re typing . And while tapping on the screen brings up or can the virtual keyboard , it does so by hide out the toolbar at the bottom , which can be frustrating . Better would have been for Beejive to simply get disembarrass of the toolbar in the chat style , since it ’s kind of surplus there anyway .
Despite the interface , the Indian file transfer aspect of Beejive work fairly well . you’re able to send buddies pictures ( either from the iPhone ’s Photo Album or lease with the camera ) or phonation notes ( via a establish - in voice registrar ) ; for the latter , your buddy will get a hyperlink to your single file , which is upload to Beejive ’s servers ( probably not something you ’d want to do for sensible material ) , but for photos you’re able to opt between charge a link or sending the Indian file straight .
Beejive ’s file receiving capabilities are much more powerful , however : you could receive pictures , strait , and other file that the iPhone can view ( Word written document , PDFs , and so forth ) . The only problem is that once you have a Indian file in Beejive , you ca n’t do anything other than view it or forward it to another contact via IM or SMS — you ca n’t e - mail it to yourself or save a picture to your Camera Roll .
There are a fistful of other features that Beejive sports that some users might retrieve handy : you’re able to alternate the iPhone and chat in landscape painting way , enable an pick switch back and onward between chats by shaking the sound , insert emoticon into your New World chat , and even change the background delineation of your chat . The only modest problem I encountered was that Beejive ’s Buddy List does n’t show the AIM Blast group I use to commune with some of my colleagues . I could receive messages for the mathematical group and , once I ’d received a message , I could respond to the radical , but I could n’t send a message to the grouping without receiving one first .
From a functionality point of view , BeejiveIM is certainly a very capable IM node with features above and beyond those of much of its rivalry . Its unintuitive user interface can be frustrating at times , but that decrease over time , and while its price tag might be off - putting to some , it come down to how much you need the power that Beejive can offer you .
BeejiveIM is compatible with any iPhone or iPod spot running the iPhone 2.x software package update .
[ Associate editor program Dan Moren runs the MacUser web log . ]
