Beejive IM 3.0 With Push has the potential to expand the iPhone’s instant messaging capabilities. Despite a few bugs, it has some great features that IM power users should consider.
Beejive contains all major instant messaging applications: AIM, Google Talk, Facebook, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, etc. If you IM, chances are your favorite service is here.
The interface is [...]

AIM – Instant messaging has never been one of the iPhone’s strengths. Apple’s limitations on allowing apps to run in the background means that you can’t receive an IM notification while you are working within another program. Close it down, and you are off-line. A new version of AIM seeks to change this and give [...]

There’s been a lot of buzz about Beejive’s BeeJiveIM lately. That’s easy to understand because BeeJiveIM is a very capable IM app. It puts everything IM-ish under one roof, which other IM apps don’t do quite as well. But geez Louise, is it really worth $15.99? Well, that depends on just how much you use [...]

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.
Also, social networks currently don’t exploit the advantage provided by iPhone Contacts [...]

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 [...]