It's great! It will introduce people to basic IM on BlackBerry, and be a stepping stone to superior IM software too;
I think it won't hurt PDAapps in the long term -- and actually help them, because sometimes people may be looking for superior alternatives.
"Dangit, why can't I just hit Enter to send IM's"
"Why can't I be logged onto both AIM and Yahoo simultaneously?"
"MSN is missing!"
"Notifications are not as configurable as I want them to be!"
"I want to multitask 2 conversations simultaneously at one hotkey!"
etc.
Verichat solves all the above problems, for example...
(I am comparing to the instant messaging client installed on 7100t's)
RIM is doing a great thing by making BlackBerries more popular and consumer-friendly, however, I don't view it as the demise of third party instant messaging software. That's why some of us pay $30 to buy Trillian (For Desktop PC's) from
www.trillian.cc to replace MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, into one software program. Unless RIM does a miracle of making the software 100 times better than the 7100t instant messaging software, I'm one of those heavy users who still need to use third party software...
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