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CTA RATING: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

Palringo is a new Instant Messenger client that came out on Saturday this past weekend.  We spotted it and decided to give it a shot over AIM.  Palringo claims it does everything that AIM doesn’t, like photo messaging and even voice messaging.  We think that it could be decent competition for AOL’s AIM client for iPhone but aren’t really impressed with the app just yet. Full review after the break…

From the get go we’re pretty disappointed.  It turns out that you must register with Palringo before you can even begin to use the application.  I’ve heard reports that registration was impossible on launch day… too many people and not enough bandwidth.  It’s not really surprising to me because there is a plethora of people looking for a new IM client to replace AIM.  Many people don’t even use AIM but rather Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, or even Windows Live (Yuck!).  This app supports all of those and more, so it’s not surprising to see a lot of people jumping all over it as soon as it’s available.  We’ll get passed the first day jitters as registration currently seems to be working fine and start reviewing the app.

After creating a Palringo account using our junk email address, we started looking around the app.  It took us to the contacts page first where we only had two people listed.  Palringo Support and some Stephanie chick.  We didn’t give a rip about writing either of those contacts so we deleted them and started to look around a bit to see how we could add the advertised AIM and Google Talk accounts.  There are three main buttons at the top of the screen. The first one is your “P” profile button, the next is the Contacts button and the last is the Groups button.  We’re not keen on group chat, so we’ve not exactly played with that much.  You could let us know how it functions in the comments if you’re brave enough to talk to strangers.  The fourth most important button, depending on how you look at it, is the Edit button.  You can actually add another account to Palringo by tapping the Edit button and then the “+” button in the Profiles page.  From there you can choose from the following accounts:

  • Windows Live Messenger
  • Yahoo! Messenger
  • AOL Instant Messenger
  • Gadu-Gadu
  • AOL ICQ
  • XMPP / Jabber
  • Google Talk
  • iChat
From there we added our AIM account and began the testing.  We logged into the account and were off.  We hit up one of our friends with an IM, but it was never received.  It seems like this application has a little bit of an issue with keeping signed in with AIM.  We know that we’re not signed in on any other chat client, so it’s not a multiple logins issue.  It just, plain and simple, refuses to connect on consistent basis:  ”Could not connect to authentication…”  We were, however, able to keep it connected long enough to send about 15 messages, including some photos, to various friends.  It seems as though every 10-15 login attempts are actually successful…ugh.  If we actually get logged in, it’s only for a couple of minutes… so at this point, it’s kinda worthless because you can’t send a message when you want to and can’t receive a message when it comes in.  
We’re hoping that other accounts work a little better.  We tried signing into our Google Talk account just now, entered our email and password but after the account was added, it said it was a Jabber account… hmm.  Nevermind, it’s just showing the Jabber logo where the Google Talk logo should be.  Still works just fine.  It also had a small problem logging in: it couldn’t connect to the server for a tid bit, but eventually got connected just fine… and then… it crashed.  Needless to say, this app looked fairly promising, but is NOT without issues… make that, major issues.
As far as your standard messaging features are concerned — there is no emoticon support whatsoever, photos seem to send well, the messaging format is unhelpful and the supposed voice recording is nowhere to be found.  Since we didn’t see emoticons in the program itself, we tried sending some from another chat client to Palringo.  If you’re used to seeing text-based emoticons, it works well, but for those of us who are used to click-and-insert emoticons, it doesn’t really do much besides display the text equivalent.  We sent a photo taken with the iPhone’s camera to another chat client, and it worked without any issues. Wow.  We can’t say the same for the voice function because it doesn’t even appear to be in this build of the app.  
The layout of the chat portion of the app is fairly poor.  Yes, you can read all the messages you receive, but there is no formatting of your messages versus your contacts’ messages. They all look the same.  Differentiation is a must have for any chat client.  I can’t even think of another client that displays messages so poorly.  We’ll quit bombing the app now because it is a 1.0 application, and we should cut it a little bit of slack.  Or should we?  
With the size of bite this application took from the beginning, wouldn’t you expect the company to be able to chew it without gagging multiple times before it finally gulps it down? It’s obvious that they are trying to kill AIM by putting out a better chat client for the iPhone. I can’t help but wonder what the app would be like if they didn’t try and do so much all at once.  Maybe they should have focused on AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messaging first and then added the other services later.  Who uses Windows Live anyways?  Because they did attempt so much in the first rollout, they created a pretty crappy application that is going to spend the next several revisions playing catchup and hoping that they don’t lose potential customers along the way.
We really do wish that this app worked better so we could give it a better rating.  With the revisions listed below, we fully expect it to kill AIM for iPhone:
  • Stop the Palringo Requirement – Let your users choose whether or not they want a Palringo account.  It’s almost a little government the way you make us register.  It might also make your app usable for those who couldn’t register.
  • Easier Menus? – Now that we’ve used it a bit, it seems like second nature, but initially it was a little difficult to figure out navigation and features.
  • Better Account Support – Really?  We have to ask?  I shouldn’t have to worry whether or not an app is going to connect to an account that is advertised as supported.
  • Logos – We really think that you should show the correct logo for each account.  I want to see the Google Talk logo next to my Google Talk account.
  • Make Me Happy! – We’re think about writing an open letter to Palringo just for emoticons.
  • Voice Messaging? – So where did this go? (Update) After a careful study of the description, it says that you can receive voice messages but not send?  It looks like they changed the description on us because we are sure that it talked about using the built-in microphone for this feature.  Fail. 
  • Message Formatting – We need to see our messages versus our contacts’ message in a different color or format… period.  
  • Better Business Plan – A reviewer really shouldn’t have to tell you what to do with your business, but that’s how we think here at CTA.  We pick ONE thing we’re good at and do it well until our customers believe in us, and THEN branch out into the next venture.  You guys just bit off more than you could chew with this one.
  • There’s More, but That’s Enough – There are a lot of other bugs that we didn’t even mention here because we’ve bashed the app enough already.  If you see more, leave them in the comments.
Alright, that’s it.  Seriously, if you could fix half of the things we mentioned above, you would have a stellar app.  If you fix all of them, you would knock the sox right off of AOL. Please get this right so we can support you as much as we want to.

 

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