Yahoo Messenger - Popular Instant Messaging App comes to iPhone; Allows you to Send Free SMS

My favorite instant messaging application for the desktop is Yahoo Messenger. So I was quite keen to check Yahoo Messenger for iPhone when it was released on the App Store earlier in the week.

Yahoo Messenger for iPhone has most of the features available on the desktop version such as sending IM and SMS messages, support for emoticons, status updates, adding new contacts, and sharing photos.

It's great to finally see Yahoo release their popular instant messaging app for the iPhone. They have also released their Mobile app for iPhone which includes the messenger feature, but I prefer the standalone iPhone app.

Here are some of the features of Yahoo Messenger for iPhone:

Instant message: Send text messages back and forth with your friends, including emoticons and web links.

 

Photo sharing: Take a photo on your iPhone and send that, or grab one from your photo gallery to share.

Stealth settings: Sign in as invisible, or change your status to invisible once you’re in the app.

Custom status message: Enter a custom status message for your friends to see. You can even include a web link with it.

Recent conversations archive: Under Messages, tap a contact, and you’ll see your most recent conversation. You can type in a message from there to start chatting again.

Special idle state: If you have to leave the app for whatever reason, like a call comes in or you click a link in an IM that takes you to Safari, the Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone app will keep you signed in but change your status to idle. That way you can continue to receive messages and provided you return to the app within ten minutes, pick up where you left off.

Additional settings: Tap the Settings icon to change the sort order of your contact list, or to show or hide offline contacts in your list.

As you can seen from the screenshots, the user interface of the iPhone app is very clean and easy to use.

If you get a message while you are in a different chat window, you get a notification similar to the desktop app. If you get a message while your iPhone (screen) is locked while the app is still running then you get a buzz. It would have been nice if they had provided a setting to turn the notification functionality off as I personally find it annoying.

The killer feature of the iPhone app is the ability to free send free SMS messages to your friends mobile phones. If your friend replies to your message, you get it right in the iPhone app. However, its important to note that you can send and receive SMS messages only in Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam..

One of the drawbacks of the app is that you cannot run it in the background but that because of the limitation of iPhone's SDK rather an oversight by Yahoo (unless you have jailbroken your iPhone and are using Backgrounder). This limitation will be addressed with Push Notification Service which Apple announced will be finally coming in iPhone firmware 3.0 this summer.

I would have also preferred an option to set the time after which I should be signed out for the "Special idle state" feature.

You can checkout the short video demo below to see Yahoo Messenger for iPhone in action:

Verdict:

If you use only Yahoo messenger for instant messaging on the desktop then this is the perfect companion app for you while you are on the move. The user interface of the iPhone app is clean and very simple to use.

It's also a great alternative to send unlimited free SMS messages if you are a heavy SMS user (assuming you are from the countries where this feature is available).

Since I have friends across various IM networks, I will still use BeejiveIM, our favorite instant messaging app for the iPhone. I also think using a single iPhone app which supports multiple IM network makes a lot more sense on mobile phones which have resource constraints rather than running multiple instant messaging apps.

As always, please give us your feedback on Yahoo Messenger for iPhone in the comments section.

[ Yahoo Messenger blog, Download Yahoo Messenger for iPhone for free from this direct iTunes link]