MSN on my Droid?

Welcome fellow mobile IM’ing peeps, today I’ll be presenting you with my review of 5 Instant Messaging applications that can be found on the Android Market. I primarily use MSN as my IM client so I’ll be focusing on apps for MSN. This review was done using a Motorola Droid from Verizon running Froyo 2.2 and the images captured were done on the same device. Three of these applications are dedicated MSN (or Windows Live Messenger) apps and the other two are popular multi-IM apps; they are as follows: Hi MSN, MSN Droid, MSN Talk, IM+ Lite, and Meebo.

The review will be laid out in table format with sections throughout dedicated to each IM app. At the header of each section you’ll find the name of the IM app, the icon representing it, and next to that a QR (Quick-Response) code for you to scan with your android device (note: you need a barcode scanner app to do this). Underneath the header will be two sections with the top one being dedicated to that particular IM app’s features and on the bottom one my experiences/criticisms. Lastly, under all that you’ll find a quick gallery of screenshots of the IM app. Enjoy!

Hi MSN
Features Landscape Support Nudge Support Wink Support Emoticons* E-mail yourself a copy of your conversations Change your name, status, and personal message Change your app’s theme, font colour, and background colour Enable/Disable chat bubble Able to Add Contacts into groups Change LED notification colour Custom notification sounds Able to see others’ avatars Ad-supported
Review *The emoticons it shows on the app aren’t the official MSN emoticons and are instead custom ones that won’t display as-is on the recipient’s MSN unless they’re using Hi MSN too. It doesn’t support group chats, if you’re invited into one you won’t be able to see it and will instead receive these messages in separate chat windows. It doesn’t have the option to go invisible. Can’t change your avatar from within the application. Being able to e-mail yourself a copy of a conversation is nice but it’d be more convenient if all your conversations were automatically saved to the SD card or online without one having to remember to save. You can’t see your contact’s custom fonts and colours. It should be noted that there is a separate version of this app just for users stuck using Android 1.5. The latest report on android OS trends shows that still 25% of you are stuck on that old version of Android so it’s nice of Hi MSN to have a version for you peeps.
Gallery
MSN Droid
Features Landscape support Sign-in with a custom status Able to see others’ avatars Search through contacts Change your name, status, and personal message Chat history Custom notification sounds. Contact Drawer* Ad-supported
Review Sign-in screen is similar to the official MSN one which is a nice touch; although, you can’t sign-in as invisible to your contacts, and also it appears you can’t go invisible at all even once signed in – pretty lame for all us habitually incognito peeps. Mindful of poor/slow internet connections in that it doesn’t automatically go and download your contacts’ avatars unless you go into settings and tell it too; for the rest of us with solid and fast connections this will be a minor inconvenience. A nice touch in that it will display emoticons in your contacts’ names if they have them. You may select between seeing your contacts’ display names or nicknames which is alright if you’re into giving nicknames to your MSN peeps. The chat history is a nice touch but it would sure help if it made clear who was talking in the speech bubbles (note: reference the 4th image in the gallery). Unfortunately you can’t change the LED notification colour on this particular app, oh well. *The contact drawer is a very nice touch in that it easily allows you to check what conversations you have open and to swap between those easily.
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MSN Talk
Features Landscape support Custom sign-in status which includes invisible! Custom name, status, and personal message Change your avatar from your phone’s gallery! Add contacts Auto Idle (away) option Custom LED notification Custom notification sound Customize background colour, font colour Nudge support Offline messaging support Multiple Places/locations sign-in support Ad-supported
Review A big feature of MSN Talk is the ability to change your avatar from within the app itself using your phone’s gallery; note, none of the other IM apps reviewed here allows you to change your avatar from within their app. A second big feature is the ability to do group chats and to invite people into group chats; note, none of the other IM apps reviewed here allow you to do this or evens support group chat. A third big feature is that it supports multiple place/location sign-in so if you wanted to you could have your desktop MSN client logged in and your mobile MSN Talk logged in as well. What would that be of any use for? You could walk away from the computer and still be having the same conversations on your phone – uninterrupted! Sign-in as invisible is definitely a big plus since the other two don’t include this option even when signed-in. The offline messaging works real well on MSN Talk and there are no issues with talking to contacts when you’re incognito/invisible. It supports displaying your contacts in groups but it can be a bit peculiar in that it’ll display your favorites without an option to remove that. Contacts’ avatar images are bit on the small side and there’s no option to customize the size of their avatars on the main window (note: refer to the image gallery). You can turn off nudges if you’d like which is a big plus.
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IM+ Lite
Features Landscape support Multiple IM protocol (i.e. it supports multiple IM services like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, etc.) Chat History Ad-supported
Review The main screen is a little uninviting in that it doesn’t show you your login name unless you swap screens for it. No avatar support!! Paid version is available but for the purposes of this review I didn’t bother with any paid apps. Weird spacing issues between messages sent that’s only noticeable on the recipient’s chat window. No nudge or wink support – but, is this really a bad thing? Changing your status on the app doesn’t register on your contacts’ end (e.g. you change it to ‘busy’ and your contacts still see you as online/available). Not much customization available at all, there’s truly nothing special about this super simple app (note: reference the image gallery). A very big negative in that you can’t customize your name, avatar, or personal message from within the app itself.
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Meebo
Features Landscape support Multiple IM protocol (i.e. it supports multiple IM services like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, etc.) Chat History* Add Contacts into groups See contacts’ avatar Custom status and personal message
Review *You must have a meebo account and be logged in under it in order to get your chat history support and be able to access it from anywhere. Tiny font and avatars used for contacts makes it difficult to select contacts – it’s easy to accidently select a contact you didn’t intent to talk to. Add contacts into specific groups. Almost zero customization; this is a trend among multiple IM protocol apps in that none offer customization for any specific service and only offer barebones chat support. Weird issue where if you IM a contact and the contact responds Meebo will open a new chat window separate from the one you started. Disconnects often and fails to notify you if and when it disconnects so you won’t know until you check Meebo!! This one particularly issue is why I stopped using Meebo altogether, they’ve had several months now to fix it and haven’t done so yet.
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Final Thoughts

So with that all said and done would you like for me to tell you which IM app is superior? Too bad! I like all 3 MSN apps and think you can’t go wrong using any one of them, but if you care about winks you only have the Hi MSN option; if you care about proper group chat support, invisible status, and being able to change your avatar then MSN Talk is your only option; MSN Droid just has themes going for it (Lol), but it’s cool too. What I will say is don’t bother with multiple IM protocol apps for they suck and if at all possible download a dedicated IM service app and you’ll be much better off.