After using Slick for a few days, I gotta say that I'm hooked. The usability is solid. You have so many features all bundled up in a nice little application. The battery and memory usage of this application is minimal, which is a major factor when you have an application constantly running. Of course it does drain your battery a bit, but not as much as you'd think. I ran this program for about four hours straight and only lost a few bars on my Nokia N95, which has a weak battery. Thats with about 3 calls and 10 text messages. You can login to your Yahoo, Aim, Gtalk, ICQ, or Jabber accounts all at the same time.
I'll start with the nitty gritty features of what you'd want from an instant messaging application on your S60 device.
Settings
This is where I think this program excels. Here's a list of the settings you can control:
Hide Offline
Show Groups
Set Away After X Amount Of Minutes
Sounds -
- On or Off
- New message sound file and volume
- Nudge sound file and volume
- File Transfer Success/Failure sound file and volume
- Online/Offline Notification of your buddies sound file and volume
Send By Enter Key
Show Message Times
Message History X amount of days
Text Coding
Font Size
System Application (prevents from closing under low memory conditions)
Auto Connect
Auto Re-Connect After Data Interruption (call)
Access Point
What a list right? That list completely blows away other free Instant Messenger applications like Palringo.
Chatting
Extremely simple and easy to chat with your buddies. The chat interface is nice, and you can talk with more than one at a time. In the screenshot you can see where it says "kevin" right below the chat window. If I was talking with other people at the time, you would see other tabs that you can easily scroll over to. Chatting makes good use of T9 Text Input, so you type words just as if you would type a text message. While chatting you can see if someone is typing out a message for you. There would be a pencil icon at the top of the screen next to the screen name of the user your talking to. This little feature is something that makes this application such a joy to use. You can also push menu and add smileys, send files, clear history, and go back to your buddy list. Of course when you go back to your buddy list you won't lose your conversations. All you have to do is click the buddy you were talking to and the whole chat is still there. Pretty Slick.Buddy List
Standby Screen Notification
This one is huge. When you have the application in the background you get a notification in the top right corner of who IMed you when you were away. This is great if you are busy or didn't hear your message alert. This is a big step up from other free instant messaging applications.Things I Would Change
Not much. This application is pretty solid especially for being free and still in the beta stage. I'm not sure if they are eventually going to start charging, but it's probably something I'd pay for if they did. I would change or give more options for the colors of the application. I think they are horrendous. Purple and yellow? My two most hated colors. It would be really great if it can automatically use your theme colors. I would also give an option to turn off the standby screen notification, as it might bother some picky people (but not my I love that feature). One more thing is a battery save feature like I've seen in other applications. After you don't use the application for more than 20 minutes or so, it would be cool if it can disconnect and reconnect every 15 minutes or so to check for new messages and alert you automatically.
Thats about it for this application. I'm still going to write up a review about the other free instant messaging application I mentioned earlier this week called Palringo, but in my opinion Slick Instant Messenger is just way better.
Here are the features from Slick's Official Website:
- Supported protocols:
ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber - Text messaging
- Emoticons
- Alerts - sound, backlight, vibration, notify window displaying number of new messages
- Group and buddy management (add, delete, rename)
- Message history
- File transfer - send and receive files
- Sending / receiving offline messages
- Downloading files sent as links
- More features to be added
Click here to download Slick.
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i would also add a push to talk feature similiar to the one in the Palringo App.
yes that would be a great feature. if slick can throw in a webcam feature as well, holy crap this application would get app of the year in my book.
I debranded my N95 specifically to gain access to the "IM" application which my operator had hidden from me. That app is however a(\n) MIPS client, so you have to register at a third party website (I use mobjab). So far so good, I mean it works right?
It seems to run as a system service thing, which is good.
However, once your account is set up, you can't log in to a different AIM account for example - you have to go to a DESKTOP PC, load up a JAVA client on there, and configure your account through that. That's right, there's no web interface.
The IM client itself is good, although the MIPS server does some weird things. Bold text comes through surrounded by asterisks even though my device can support fonts. If you use it while travelling and your service is interrupted, the application can crash and sometimes become unusable until you next start the phone. It's a bit unstable in that if the connection is dropped it can become unresponsive for possibly a few hours until it reconnects. The client has a logging feature, but you have to turn it on in every conversation where you want to use it - before you want to use it.
Of course, the MIPS server is only a gateway to the various IM services so it has almost no contact management possibilities. Yes, you can delete and block contacts (but if you block them, you must also delete them) but I don't really see how to add them.
Of course, mobjab.mobi has its own errors periodically whiuch results in individual services being disconnected on a regular basis.
So if it has all these problems, why use it?
- it parses phone numbers and links, same as the SMS functionality in the phone. Other clients such as Nimbuzz lacked this feature and it drove me crazy as my friends and I are all hyperlink addicts
- It provides notifications of new messages on the active standby screen
- it almost never ever closes
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I've never tried or heard of slick, but it sounds like it has all of the good features of the Nokia IM application and none of the bad (although yeah, your screenshots are super ugly - I hate those colours).
I'm off to try it out right now!
More on the Nokia IM client
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Oh, and another thing is that although my outgoing messages would sometimes randomly fail (serverside...), with the built-in IM client I can scan up to messages sent/received during the conversation and "forward" them to other contacts - or the same contact - or ultimately even the clipboard. When someone sends me code or something for the calendar, this is an essential capability.
Another thing I'd like though, which is NOTABLY absent, is the ability to send messages to my offline contacts. Even if the contact has only just sent me a message, I can't reply and I get my own messages bounced back to me verbatim as if my contact were a "parrot".
This especially sucks as I have some contacts who for privacy reasons (or something) stay offline 24/7 and they think that I'm ignoring them. Again, this is a problem that I encounter when using the built-in client but it's not really a client-side problem. The client doesn't particularly care if someone is online or off (although I think it warns if you try to start a conversation with an offline contact), so I'm picking that this is a big serverside bug.
Ultimately, because the in-built IM client can only be used as a universal messenger with the help of a MIPS server, you add an extra point of failure and ultimately it means more bugs and more downtime.
SneakyWho_am_i you can send offline messages to contacts.. for gmail, it requires that you both enable chat history under your gmail account and voila it works :) i was stuck with the same problem as you with messages getting bounced back to me like a parrot till i figured that out :)
i like slick but the emocation is not complete
How do you rename a Yahoo buddy?
I'd find Slick a lot better if it didnt insist on closing itself repeatedly. Looks like I'll be looking for a different application unelss there is any fix to this?
Chat rooms are used both commercially and personally. Becoming a member in one of the instant messenger programs offer unlimited text and voice messages.