If you’ve had an iPhone since the launch of Apples Application Store, then you most likely have bought the app Mobile Chat. I mean who wouldn’t, just looking at their features http://mobilech.at/features you’d be silly not to pick the only instant messenger on the iPhone. Granted there are Web App versions, but nothing application wise. Here are some of the features.
MobileChat supports the following protocols:
* AIM/ICQ/.Mac/MobileME
* Windows Live/MSN
* Yahoo Messenger
* GTalk
* Jabber/XMPPMultiple Accounts
Now all of your accounts can be online at one time. You can connect up to 10 accounts over varying networks simultaneously. That means you can have your 3 AIM accounts, your GTalk account and your 2 MSN accounts all connected from your iPhone.
Buddy Icon Support
Set your buddy icon from a picture in your photo library and see your friend’s icons too. A first for MobileChat!
Profiles & Away Messages
Set your profile and view your friend’s or set a personalized away message.
Many people will purchase this application since its rather cheap, coming in at only $2.99 isn’t going to break your budget.
So you pay $2.99 and can’t wait for it to install so you can login to MSN and message all your friends from your iPhone. However after it installs and you setup your MSN account and try to connect it works! Congratulations you’re one of the luckiest people to have purchased this application and actually have it work out of the box. To this day I have only been able to login to MSN once and talk to a friend. And that wasn’t even after I installed the application.
To much amazement after having issues I wondered if anyone else was having the same issue as me. And yes, lots of people were reporting the same issue. And there was a response by the Twenty08 team that develops Mobile Chat
http://tumblr.twenty08.com/post/47822232/what-we-did-wrong-and-how-were-going-to-fix-it
Which was a nice relieve to the people who paid for the application but a even bigger relieve to the people who just wanted what was advertise. I mean all money aside, Mobile Chat is something almost every person with an iPhone wanted.
Then even more information start coming out about what the issue was, and each week there was even more problems and updates. Here are some blog posts that I’m talking about, they speak for themselves.
http://tumblr.twenty08.com/post/45993283/bringing-in-the-big-guns
http://tumblr.twenty08.com/post/46106023/aim-connectivity-issue
http://tumblr.twenty08.com/post/47860210/mobilechat-server-2-0
http://tumblr.twenty08.com/post/48490814/mobilechat-status-update
And even today as I’m writing this article, I still can’t seem to connect to MSN or Gmail Talk.
Now, I didn’t request a refund. Why? It’s pocket change, and I’d rather have the developers keep the money they’ve probably already spent. I just can’t get past the bad taste this whole application gave me. I’m at a lost of words.
