BeeJive
This app is right up there with Tweetie in the most-beautiful-and-useful app contest.
BeeJive’s push notifications have almost eliminated my need for SMS. Most of the people I communicate with regularly have iPhones, and also have BeeJive.
MMS on iPhone finally? It doesn’t matter, because BeeJive now lets you send pictures inside of chats. It also can send voice clips now. The files are uploaded to some storage space on BeeJive’s servers.
The killer feature now released in 3.1 is group chat. On the fly, you can create chat rooms and invite friends into them. Every message sent to the chat room sends a push notification to your phone. In the few minutes we were messing with it, it worked perfectly. This functionality doesn’t even work correctly in Gchat, in my experience. Now we can all argue about where to go out on Saturday night together on our phones!
All the people I talk to are on Gchat now, so I never use AIM, Yahoo!, or MSN at all. One of my favorite features of Gchat is that it archives all my conversation history in my Gmail account. I search my chat history regularly when looking for a link someone sent me, an email address, or some other info. And because all Gchat activity in BeeJive goes through Google’s server’s, even mobile chat history is archived.
The app is $10, but we’ve saved more than that just by cutting out our SMS plan with AT&T.
