Pinger Phone is designed to integrate instant messaging and social networking into the iPhone experience, says Joe Sipher, a co-founder of Pinger. IM offers presence (the ability to know who is actively online), is faster and can be cheaper than text messaging, Sipher argues. (…)

There seems to be a new chat program popping up every other month and old screen names we can’t get rid of. In today’s chat market it’s hard to find a good utility or an app that offers total integration between all of the old programs that have emerged over the years and the new ones. IM+ offers users the opportunity to combine their AOL, YAHOO, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ and MySpace instant message screen names and buddies all in one place.

AOL Instant Messenger for iPhone is a fine product, and works just the way you would expect it to — with one major flaw: unless the application is open (and currently you can have exactly one application open at a time), you don’t get alerted when you receive a message.
How and when Apple will fix this remains to be seen. (…)