AIM
CTA RATING: 
 
A.O.L. Instant Messenger for iPhone is currently the most polished mobile messenger app in existence.  It still doesn’t equal Apple’s visual design prowess but we think the simplicity of it comes close, and is worthy–for the most part–to be on the iPhone. Â
I was excited to hear that AOL was producing AIM for the iPhone.  Not all of you may remember, but for a long time, the first generation iPhone was restricted to webapps.  Those of you who tried the web-based instant messenger clients, bugs and glitches galore, will share our dream and joy of native messaging. Don’t get too excited yet because the biggest complaint from web-based messaging carried over… No background support! Â
Why do I need background support?  Without it, AIM essentially shuts down when you leave the app itself.  I don’t know about you, but that makes a mobile messenger pretty useless to me.  Having to reconnect and see if someone I needed to talk to is still online is one thing, but what if I need to make a quick phone call and forget that my grandma’s waiting for a response on aim?  No more Christmas cookies!  Those familiar with AIM understand that a quick response is the norm… What would happen if I forget to open the application again for hours? Â
This is something Apple addressed at the WWDC this year, with background servers that run the processes and push them to your device.  However, with the resources AOL has had since the dawn of the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) phone, they could have set us up with a solution to hold us over.  Some of you may remember when mobile AIM sent a text message instead of a web message.  It would not be difficult for AOL to include a setting that would enable text message notification when someone replies to your chat.  There will be those on limited text plans who want this to be disabled so it would need to be a enable/disable setting.  It also wouldn’t be to difficult to setup a direct link from that text message to the AIM client on my phone; check out what we did with the AIM picture above and you’ll see what we mean.
Overall, it’s a well placed app and the fact that its price-point is zero is a huge benefit.  I would have guessed that AOL would charge for it, but The Man can surprise you… occasionally.  If you can constantly live on one application–Junior High kids, we’re looking at you–then this app is perfect, but on a mobile device, this just isn’t going to cut it.  Luckily, we can all look forward to the next revision.
Crucial stuff for the next revision:
- “Keep me signed in†and “Sign me out†selections in the app – This would allow my AIM buddies to see me and send me messages while I’m off perusing the other great apps on my iPhone.
- Photo Sharing via AIM – The camera protocol is built right into the AIM app to take a current picture so why wouldn’t we be able to grab a snapshot and send it to our buddies just like the desktop app?
- Do I even dare say it?  Video chat – I think Apple has a little lot more work to do (hardware and software additions) before we’ll see true video recording on the iPhone, let alone video chat.
- Of course we have to mention the “push†updates – According to El Jobso, Apple “has a solution.† If the rollout of Push Application Updates goes as poorly as the MobileMe transition, we all could be in Grandma’s dog house for a long time.
- As always – if you have any other features you’d like to see in the next revision, we would love to see them posted in the comments.
- AIM Demo Picture 1
- AIM Demo Picture 2
- AIM Demo Picture 3
- AIM Demo Picture 4
- AIM iTunes Info
about 2 years ago
One more thing I would like to see is better intergration with contacts. In iChat you can pull from your address book to fill in your buddy’s names and icons. This is helpful if you have a large buddy list and don’t want to memorize screennames. It may require assistance from apple, the desktop address book has an AIM field and contacts doesn’t, but this should be a simple fix!
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