Although AIM with push notification support for the iPhone and iPod touch arrived in both free and pay for versions last week, there are two programs running $9.99 each currently available via the App Store that support both push notifications and multiple instant messaging platforms: BeejiveIM and IM+. We decided to grab both applications and put them through some usage tests over the weekend. Read on to discover which, if either, of these two apps is the right chat client for your iPhone or iPod touch.

BeejiveIM

BeejiveIM ($9.99; direct link to iTunes) supports AIM/MobileMe, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN/Windows Live, MySpace IM, Yahoo! Messenger, and Facebook IM. You can also set up multiple chat accounts on the same protocol. You can login to individual accounts or all of your accounts at once, and you can set up separate availability messages for each of your IM accounts and create custom away messages as well. You can also update your Facebook profile status by navigating to the Accounts tab and selecting Facebook and then editing the Status field, which is a nice feature for Facebook fans.

BeejiveIM supports typing in both portrait and landscape modes and offers push notifications with a variety of options (such as sound/no sound, vibrating, preview of the message, etc). You can also choose a color scheme and set a background picture for your chats. The application also provides a number count on its icon so you can at a glance tell how many new messages from your contacts are awaiting you. These features are shared by IM+. 

However, BeejiveIM adds a bit more customization options by offering a full list of preferences outside of the app itself in the iPhone / iPod touch's Settings. It also manages to provide you with a bit more screen real estate while typing your messages by showing a dark gray preview pop-up rather than leaving a permanent text field in place that gets in the way of reading messages sent to you. You can also simply tap the screen above the keyboard to collapse the keyboard so you can read more of what your chatty friend is saying, but this collapsing keyboard is a feature shared by IM+.

BeejiveIM offers the ability to send both images (either by taking a new picture of choosing one from your photo albums on the device) and short audio files to the person with whom you are chatting. You can change the preferences to attempt to send the files directly to your contacts, but by default the files are posted to a website and the URL is sent to your contact. You can also save transcripts of conversations you have while on the go with BeejiveIM by emailing the transcript to yourself or to someone else, which is a vital feature for keeping track of information communicated while on the go that would appear to be missing from all other iPhone capable chat clients. As you can see in the picture above, all of this functionality, in addition to the ability to close your current conversation is available by an overlay menu at the top of the screen that can be brought up by clicking on the name of your contact.

Speaking of your contact's names, BeejiveIM supports integration with your contact list, so that you can display your chat buddies actual names rather than their sometimes bizarre and difficult to remember IM handles. When one of your contacts sends you a link in an IM, you have the option of opening the link in Safari, in a Webview preview pane within BeejiveIM itself, or the option to Forward the link. Unfortunately, we're not quite certain whether Forward is supposed to allow you to forward the link to another chat contact, email the link to a friend, or what, as every time we tried to use that option, it crashed BeejiveIM.

And this brings us to another point about BeejiveIM: there is some general bugginess about the application that one has to become accustomed to and learn to sidestep whenever possible (the same is true of IM+ although in different areas). In addition to this bug that causes the Forward button pictured above to behave as a "crash this program now" button, after initially installing BeejiveIM, the application continually crashed on us. At first we thought we'd been duped by all our friends who had recommended the application, but after doing some investigating online, we discovered that this seems to be a problem that many experience right after installing the application. Fully powering off your iPhone or iPod touch after installation is recommended as this seems to sidestep the multiple crashings problem. We actually fully powered off our iPhone 3GS, started it back up, and still experienced crashing, so we went through the entire reboot process again and then synced the iPhone 3GS with our computer via iTunes and then rebooted it again and this solved the crashing problems.

Another problem we discovered with BeejiveIM has to do with connecting and reconnecting to networks and logging into AIM from multiple locations. BeejiveIM is very intolerant of being logged in to your desktop client at the same time that you're logged into AIM via BeejiveIM. It also warns you about being logged into AIM from multiple locations whenever you move from a WiFi to 3G connection, whenever your 3G connection disconnects and reconnects, or whenever your 3G connection disconnects and reconnects to an EDGE connection. 

Over the last several days, whenever we have ignored the AIM system message about being logged into multiple locations at once, it has led to multiple problems, including the inability to send messages to contacts. Messages that fail to send show up in red with a red x next to them. Touching them will attempt to resend, so all is not lost.

Once after receiving and ignoring this message, we no longer had connectivity on our phone and so we tried to log off of AIM. We received an "Unable to complete log off" error message, but BeejiveIM displayed itself as being signed off. We closed the application and then once connection was re-established began receiving IM push notifications from friends. When we clicked "View" on the push notification, BeejiveIM launched and displayed nothing. It still thought it was logged off. We tried setting our status to Available, but no chats popped up and none of our contacts loaded. We closed the application and restarted our iPhone. We again received another push notification without ever launching the program. Again when we clicked on "View" the application thought we were still logged out.

We then tried deleting our AIM account from the application. Even after we removed the account, BeejiveIM again sent us a push notification that one of our AIM friends had pinged us. We then tried adding the AIM account back to BeejiveIM with the same inability to log in effectively to the account and see any of our messages despite seeing them all clearly in the form of push notifications when the application wasn't open. The only way to fix this problem was to log in to AIM from our computer and then reply with 1 to the warning message on the computer, which effectively signed us out of AIM on BeejiveIM. Then we could successfully reconnect and use the application.

Although this sounds like a complete usability nightmare, simply replying 1 to the aol system msg (pictured above) whenever it appears in BeejiveIM would seem to effectively sidestep this type of rampant problem occurring. 

  

Figure: Progression of Push notification to preview of chat after clicking View, to actual chat in BeejiveIM. By contrast, clicking View in IM+ takes you directly to the individual chat.

IM+

 

IM+ ($9.99; direct iTunes link) supports all the same chat protocols as BeejiveIM and can also support multiple accounts on each protocol. However, IM+ has the addition of two notable extra protocols: Skype Chat (no support for actual VOIP via Skype) and Twitter. Although IM+ is by no means as robust and powerful a Twitter client as TweetDeck or Tweetie, it clearly beats them out with one amazing feature: Push notifications of new replies and DMs in Twitter. Now, Twitter doesn't actually support any real push functionality via its API, so IM+ is to a certain degree faking this functionality somehow on its end, but for the most part it works. In our tests, push notifications of new replies and DMs can at their best occur almost instantly, often beating out update notifications on desktop Twitter clients or DMs sent over SMS to our iPhone. At their worst, the push notifications would appear about 5 minutes after the fact, which is still far from horrible. You can reply to tweets within the application as if it were an actual chat, which is somewhat interesting, but like most chats it lists information in descending chronological order, which seems unnatural for Twitter, given that Twitter and all apps I've ever used with it list the tweets in reverse chronological order with the newest Tweets up top.

Push notification also works with Skype, which is convenient both for text chatting with your Skype contacts via IM+ itself and for notification that one of your contacts is ready to discuss something with you over VOIP. Both the Twitter and Skype integration within IM+ makes it a useful app to work alongside a dedicated Twitter client or Skype for iPhone (free; direct iTunes link). The push notifications from both of these services via IM+ can tell you when you need to launch the other application on your iPhone that you may have dedicated to them. 

The one downside of the Twitter push notification is that all replies are perceived as being part of the same conversation to IM+ so if you ignore the first push notification about a new reply, you will not see any subsequent reply notifications until after you've gone over to that part of the application. The same thing happens with all your DMs which are grouped together as one large conversation in IM+. You're not supposed to receive any push notifications of regular updates to your Friends Timeline, however, we have received exactly two push notifications of Twitter messages that were not addressed to us in our tests and we're not sure what caused this odd misfiring. Fortunately they were single push notifications and not an onslaught of all the updates in our timeline.

If neither Skype nor Twitter are of interest to you and you don't necessarily want or need the push notification functionality that is shared by both BeejiveIM and IM+, then you should try downloading the free ad-supported IM+ Lite (Free; direct iTunes link), which can still manage all the multiple chat protocols that the full version of IM+ can.

One of the largest complaints about IM+ is that it seems to have some problems when changing from portrait to landscape mode. There is a preference via which you can make the application default to one mode or the other, but multiple people have reported in the review section of the iTunes Store that switching this preference off of auto-orientation leads to multiple crashes within the application. To be fair, we did occasionally see similar redrawing errors to the one pictured above in BeejiveIM too, but not nearly as often as it appears in IM+. However, the problem is easily fixable by simply turning the iPhone back on its end and back again, which forces the screen to redraw. As you can see in the above screenshot of IM+, the screen space visible when using the keyboard in landscape mode is seriously encroached upon by the keyboard and chat field. There's an unnecessary gray bar that separates the top of the keyboard from the chat box itself and the chat box itself never goes away. Even without the redrawing error pictured above, this limits the screen to 2 to 3 lines of visible chat when in landscape mode. 

Like with BeejiveIM, you can send images or voice messages to your contacts. To do so, you close the keyboard and then click on the green up arrow icon that replaces the smiley face (that quickly accesses emoticons when the keyboard is showing, as pictured above) to the left of the text entry field. Doing so opens up a dialog that lets you either send a picture, a voice message, or your location, a feature that BeejiveIM lacks. The files are not sent directly to your contacts, but rather are uploaded online and sent as links to your contacts. 

Unlike BeejiveIM, all of IM+'s preferences are contained within the application itself and there are less customization options than are offered by BeejiveIM. Also you cannot set different status messages for the different services. You are either Available on all services or you are Away on all services. 

One great feature of IM+ is that clicking on View from a push notification takes you directly to that discussion instead of taking you to the conversation list first. You can also set all accounts to keep you logged in for up to three days if you want, and you can also easily toggle your various accounts on and off from the Accounts screen, a feature that would probably save BeejiveIM from the ghost push notifications problem mentioned in the above section.

Verdict

After all our testing, which one of these two chat products do we recommend most? Unfortunately, there's not an easy answer here. Each application has its own share of bugs and its own share of really killer features. As such, we're kind of pleased that we wanted to write this review for you and were able to purchase both. 

Currently, we're running both applications simultaneously, using IM+ for push notifications for Twitter and Skype, while using BeejiveIM for all our normal chatting for three primary reasons: we prefer the extra space provided in landscape typing mode in BeejiveIM, the ability to email transcripts of chats to ourselves so that the conversation isn't lost is the key feature we need that IM+ lacks, and BeejiveIM just looks a bit prettier and more polished with more customization options than IM+.

However, both applications do a good job of getting push notifications to you, of maintaining connections on your conversations when connectivity is solid, and of notifying you whenever there is no connectivity. Both applications also have huge crashing problems and bugs under the appropriate circumstances. Both applications appear to have a team of developers working on regular updates as well, so hopefully, in time, the bugs of both platforms will be squashed and new features will arrive for both.

If you must have Skype and Twitter support or you must stay logged in for 3 days in a row get IM+ (or wait for BeejiveIM to add it; I wrote the developers and they said they would like to offer support for both).

If you must have transcripts of your conversations and you like a slick interface then get BeejiveIM.

Before you spend $9.99 on either application, we recommend you try using the free ad-supported IM+ Lite (free; direct iTunes link), which can still manage all the multiple chat protocols that the full version of IM+ can. This application lacks the push notifications, the Twitter support, and the Skype support featured by its pay-for sibling, but it will give you a good idea for the look, feel, and functionality of the full version of IM+. If you want to try out push notifications of chat before spending any money, we recommend you get the free ad-supported version of AIM (direct iTunes link) which offers push notifications (but which doesn't seem to be as quick or accurate with its push notices as either IM+ or BeejiveIM).