[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Fortunately, there is a plethora of instant messenger (IM for short) applications for both the Pocket PC (Windows Mobile Professional / Classic) and MS Smartphone (Windows Mobile Standard) platforms – anyone having read the Windows Mobile Instant Messaging Bible knows this.

Now, just a day after I’ve published my latest, IM-related, for example Smartphone Thoughts-frontpaged article, my attention (thanks to XDA-Developers forum member RPG0) was pointed to another promising instant messenger solution, Inlux Messenger. It's available HERE for download.

(Screenshot on a VGA Pocket PC)

This messenger of Russian origin supports MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, G-talk and the, in Russia, popular mail.ru IM protocol. This means there’s no support for AIM and Jabber.

It’s compatible with all PPC OS’es starting with WM2003. It, however, doesn’t support the MS Smartphone platform.

The client is commercial. It seems the free version is restricted in the number of concurrent connections – it wouldn’t let my MSN / GTalk clients connect at all.

In my tests (of the current, 2.112 version), Inlux Messenger has turned out to be a pretty good but in no way excellent client. For example, it doesn’t support

VoIP (unlike Skype for Windows Mobile, Fring and, to a lesser degree (GTalk only), OctroTalk),

any kind of file receiving

multiple logins onto the same network (unlike Causerie Mobile Messenger)

auto-logging (unlike several alternatives)

any kind of copy/paste (all you can do is clicking individual words for them to be copied to the message input field; there, you can already use Ctrl-C on the virtual keyboard to copy the words onto the clipboard)

clickable links and

PDM input for easier text input (there is, on the other hand, a pretty extensive, albeit, on VGA devices, low-resolution smiley picker).

However, it’s a bit better than most other messaging apps in that it

allows for setting any character encoding (as one can guess, Cyrillic being the default)

lets for file uploading (up to 20 kBytes in size – this is a pretty bad restriction) using the traditional on-the-web access

lets for really short (much shorter than with Live Messenger) audio clip sending (1 2 3) – again, via the Web (that is, no native file / audio clip support is present)

has no problems with dynamic screen orientation change

while it doesn’t have a Today plug-in, it still has pretty good notification capabilities – for example, an icon on the taskbar

with ICQ, it allows for getting the character page (along with the avatar)

lets for saving conversations at any given time (unfortunately, in 8-bit encoding only – this means you can’t, for example, save cyrillic-encoded text)

allows for customizing the GUI, spam filtering etc. pretty well (screenshots of the main settings page: 1 2 3; the History page (note that “Save history” is only debug information stored in \Inlux Messenger.txt and NOT auto-logging conversations) 1 2). The individual, protocol-specific settings are pretty good too – you can, for example, define a different notification sound to be played / different notification scheme to be used with each network separately etc. Example screenshots: MSN: 1 2; ICQ: 1 2 3; Yahoo: 1 2; Google Talk: 1 2

Verdict

If you can live with the restrictions and/or you need the settable codepage support or the excellent, fine-tunable notification capabilities, you may want to give it a try. Otherwise, you may want to prefer other clients, particularly if you need for example Jabber / AIM support, auto-logging and conferencing capabilities, multiple logins or, as with Live Messenger, native file / voice clip transfer.