Palringo.

The name has a ring to it, don't you think? Okay, excuse the pun! As you may have noticed MoDaCo are doing a competition to promote the fledgling mobile communications app known as Palringo. You might not have heard of it, and you might just be joining in simply because you're tempted by the lure of winning an HTC Kaiser but I've found Palringo is an already very polished and promising mobile communications app that will see its way onto any compatible device I own in future.

In a nutshell, albeit a large one, Palringo is a chat, instant messaging, voice and photo sharing application that is based around a central server. This allows it to save all of your conversation history, photos and voice messages for you to access anywhere. Unlike MSN or the plethora of MSN clones out there it's clean, simple, efficient and pleasantly responsive even on my slow o2 Xda Orbit.

In addition to the standard practice of having contacts who maintain lists of friends and send instant messages to each other, Palringo supports IRC-like chat rooms known as "Groups" in which users can share photos, meet-and-greet new friends and converse about a shared interest. It's easy to create and join groups, and the groups you've joined stay in your groups list so you can remember and access them anywhere from your mobile phone, desktop PC or read group history/view photos on Palringo.com.

Groups can easily be created and moderated with the ability to make users administrators in addition to kicking, banning or silencing them. The way the persistent group list works like a contact list and shows anyone who has ever joined the group whether they are on or offline (and lets you add them as contacts) lifts Palringo above IRC as an app for meeting people with similar interests and places it firmly at the top of my list of communication apps on both desktops and mobile devices; at least for now.

At this stage Palringo is incredibly fast, I've often beaten MSN messages from one end of the office to the other but with its comparatively smaller user base Palringo delivers messages instantly. The same occurs with voice chat and photo messages, they all download surprisingly fast- at least over a wifi/broadband connection on a PC/o2 Xda Orbit -and despite the speed of delivery voice messages are exceptionally clear; an indication of a good choice of codec by the developers. As far as bandwidth is concerned (if you fear for your data plan) text messages use a negligible amount of bandwidth and voice messages are encoded at around 7kbps. Photos are the biggies; weighing in at about 20kb each. All in all it means you get 40 photos or about 15 minutes (yes, that's 15 minutes!) of voice into a single megabyte. On T-Mobile Web n' Walk you're set. With Palringo being primarily a mobile application you can rest assured it's being developed with your wallet in mind and the experience on GPRS is great.