[jlb21]

I have a Bold 9650 and I am getting my wife a VZW iPhone (to replace her dumb phone).

I would like to find a good IM app for both so we can have decent TXT/Chat communication. With BB, BBM would be always on/push. But we need a different option for cross-platform communication.

My particular question is less about functionality and more about overhead/effect on battery life to leave the app always running (to receive messages).

We both have Yahoo accounts so the Yahoo messenger may make good sense. But I know there are others:

Yahoo
Skype
Text Free
Etc........

Any thoughts on what is the best when trying to consider overhead, in addition to functionality?

Of course, we can certainly just use mail, but for those times Yahoo Mail is down or delayed, having a good other option would be great (we don't have TXT on our lines...at least not right now).

I might load SKype on my BB and my wife's soon to be VZW iPhone....just for the IM side.

Trying to weigh the relative overhead of leaving any of the following running for us to quickly communicate:

Skype
Yahoo
Other freebies like Textfree, etc.....

[motoroid7]

You could try WhatsApp? With a lot of these cross-platform communication services it's really hit or miss and personally I think you should try all of them and find which one is the most efficient and the one that you know your messages will be send/received .

[jlb21]

WhatsApp.....free for a year? Then how much???

[motoroid7]

WhatsApp.....free for a year? Then how much???

I have no idea. I honestly didn't know they were charging... :c

[jlb21]

Yeah....Website/Appworld says Use Free Trial For One Year.....or something like that....then I don't know what happens at that point.......

For basically just my wife and I.....I think we may end up using Yahoo as I already have that and it is easy to push it to her iPhone when we get it. And we both have accounts already. So unless I hear lots of stories that Yahoo Messenger is draining battery abnormally.....we may just go with that....

[kcpaynev1]

any IM message service will work fine. and if you are just gonna use the native yahoo messenger on your phone you wont have any major/ noticeable battery drain

[motoroid7]

The thing I would be a little bit worried about is if your messages are getting sent correctly, receiving messages correctly, and how well you stay connected to Yahoo's network.

I had a horrible time using the gTalk application to stay connected to my significant other on his android handset. I would constantly not receive messages or they would show up way late. I would constantly be disconnected from google's network and it wouldn't update on the other end that I was offline. Messages aren't "pushed" (on blackberry at least.) if they were you would receive them when your blackberry powered (if you happened to do a batt pull/turned off/or whatever) on or regained connection to the IM's server. :\

It's really too bad RIM doesn't figure out a way to manage this with their native IM apps. I ended up just using OS 6 SMS. (Which is better than using a IM client as I now have embedded media in text messages)

[trinityrose70]

have you tried trillian?

[motoroid7]

have you tried trillian?

internal server error ring a bell? :P