I had an interesting chat with Gaurav Banga, the CEO and co-founder of PDAapps, a small software developer based in the San Jose area. We got chatting about his very cool application, VeriChat. A lot of people use this application which is like a love-child of Danger’s instant messaging product and Trillian. It allows owners of smart phones and connected PDAs to stay in touch with their instant messaging buddies, regardless of the service. MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM users are brought into one view (just like Trillian or Fire). The messages go back to the company servers (like Danger) and then parsed to various IM services. I plan to use it soon, but looks cool. While VeriChat is right now available for Palm and Pocket PC platforms, Gaurav tells me that we should expect to see a new version for Symbian OS in about a month. That should be good news for those who own the latest Nokia and Sony Ericsson smartphones including P900. PDAapps is also working on a massive UI upgrade. And of course like all lone coders, he has a new killer app in the works as well.
There is an app for Series 60 phones similar to VeriChat called Agile Messenger. The first version was proxied, but v2.0 has cut out the middle-man server (which I think I prefer). Also look at TipicME as well, which uses J2ME on the client and Jabber on the back-end.
I fear for the small Palm development shops. They need to move to Symbian quickly, or they’re doomed to go the way of Aportis.
-Russ