WPCentral First Look: IM+ [Video]

By Daniel Rubino
last updated

Today it was announced that IM+ by ShapeServices has been submitted to the Marketplace. Assuming all is well, that means you folks should have it in your hands sometime this weekend or early next week.

But hey, why wait that long? Instead, take a gander at our video tour of the new, near universal instant messaging app that supports AIM, Facebook, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MySpace, Skype and Yahoo! The one omission is MSN, which is evidently due to a Microsoft mandate (more on that later). No biggy though, as we'll have full integration with MSN and the OS in Mango this fall.

So how's the app? Well, we couldn't get the push notifications/live tile to work, but we think that's just a temporary server issue. Point is, those features are there and should work by launch. The app design is very minimalist, which is great--it almost feels sparse, but then you remember all that it can do. Load times were decent--once again, it's a v1.0 app, so we expect performance improvements in later releases.

Overall, pretty solid start and we like what we see. Should be interesting to see how it all works out upon release.

Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and for some reason, watches. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.

10 Comments
  • Adding a new a/c is under accounts->edit->add
  • MSN is the only messenger I care about and it's not included, well that sucks.
  • do you have any issues with it starting up really slow? and showing connecting for a while before its usable?
  • I wouldn't say issues, but it can be a little slow on startup, sure. I think that's something that can be worked out on v1.1, etc. though. We see that with every app: solid design, weak on performance in v1.0, then fixed in v1.1. I assume that's true here.
  • How much will this app cost?
  • Just loaded it! Kinda slow at startup as mentioned. Other than that, looks good. I'm going to test to see how well push works.The scrolling is very choppy.Push is a no go for me too. Hopefully they'll get this ironed out around release time.
  • Just to confirm, it's coming out for non-dev phones in a few days right?
  • Yes, weekend our early next week.
  • Maybe its just me but for the last couple of weeks the toast notifications and live tile on florry aren't working either. Got to log into the app to check for new messeages. Might have any relation?
  • It nice but I want to have Skype Video or Qik video chat capability instead