Guest WoD Posted September 13, 2007 Report Share Posted September 13, 2007 [teaser]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. Keep in touch with groups of friends and meet new people. 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.[/teaser] For data tariffs that specifically forbid instant messaging like the aforementioned Web n' Walk Palringo uses an HTTP like protocol and the secure HTTPS port 443, this means that for all intents and purposes it looks like ordinary secure web browsing traffic and shouldn't get your provider in a huff. Sending a voice or image message is easy, you simply tap to the relevant tab and either tap the "Push to Talk" or "Capture Photo" button. The latter will switch to your phones camera application and let you take a quick snap to send to your contact list; this sort of integration makes chatting to friends and showing them things extremely easy and an awful lot cheaper and more efficient than video calling. Sent photos will pop up on your friends' screens as photo messages and can be opened on demand or viewed via the Palringo website later. The size of photos is limited so they're all fairly tiny on both mobile devices and the desktop version of Palringo; but this makes sure everyone can view them. Communicate with mobile users from the desktop version of Palringo Pushing the push-to-talk button will allow you to record a voice message to your hearts content, with a whole 15 minutes of voice per MB you're going to run out of things to say before it starts costing you a fortune. There's no limit on the length of the voice clips you send, but Palringo touts itself as a sort of walkie-talkie so short sentences are what's expected. You could, in theory, deliver an entire podcast into Palringo if you were mad enough. What Palringo lacks in the voice department, however, is a method of stopping, pausing or seeking voice messages. They are simply played on demand. As if Palringo's own text, picture and voice functionality wasn't enough it also supports a wide range of third party protocols such as MSN, Yahoo, AIM, GG, ICQ and XMPP. Signing into any one of these is a synch; you simply "Add Service" from the main menu, pick your desired protocol and enter your log-in credentials. This has the benefit of bringing a very unbloated and very free IM client to windows mobile. If "Windows Live Messenger" irks you by adding all your contacts into outlook mobile, then this is the way to go. Obviously, advanced functionality such as webcam/voice chat and hand-written messages aren't available in Palringo, but the basic functionality is all you're ever going to want on a mobile phone. At the moment Palringo is in its early days, the application is very short on options and there's no way to customise the UI to fit more on your device screen or set Image/Voice messages to download-on-demand rather than automatically. Also you can only have one conversation window open at any one time, but these things will be addressed soon! There are some interesting things lined up in Palringo's future, think syndicating the contents of your group to your website along with the photos posted therein and a premium version of Palringo with advanced features; although I don't know what these will shape up to be yet. Rest assured, however, that the functionality you see in Palringo today will remain free. I started using Palringo just for the chance to get an HTC Kaiser, I'm going to keep on using Palringo because it's a fantastic application with oodles of potential, a very polished, clean and simply UI and a wallet friendly price tag of absolutely no pounds and no pence. It's already top in my list of online communication apps, but really needs user support to help it thrive and grow. So give it a try! Don't forget to grab Palringo, join the MoDaCo group and send in your photos! WoD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ooVooMolly Posted September 17, 2007 Report Share Posted September 17, 2007 (edited) WoD - thanks for the review, I'm always on the look out for online communications apps, and this looks good. I write for ooVooworld, the unofficial WOM world for the free video chat download ooVoo, so I'm always looking for different software in this area and any opinions and experiences (good and bad) in the market. Palringo. this sort of integration makes chatting to friends and showing them things extremely easy and an awful lot cheaper and more efficient than video calling. I'd have to pick you up on this one though - I'm a bit of a video chat addict and something like ooVoo already lets you video chat with 6 people absolutely free. Do you really think something like Palringo is more the future than increased use of video chat and video messages? Do you use video chat as well? Edited September 17, 2007 by ooVooMolly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest kristeeezy Posted February 27, 2008 Report Share Posted February 27, 2008 great review. palringo only uses the data network, correct? not sms or mms? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Menneisyys Posted February 27, 2008 Report Share Posted February 27, 2008 great review. palringo only uses the data network, correct? not sms or mms? Yup, data only. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Menneisyys Posted February 27, 2008 Report Share Posted February 27, 2008 Palringo. The name has a ring to it, don't you think? BTW, excellent review! I quickly link to it from mine ( http://www.modaco.com/content/Smartphone-G...lient-Palringo/ ). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest suzane Posted January 12, 2010 Report Share Posted January 12, 2010 This is pretty nice features for cellular phones. It works good when the other person is actually in palringo on their phone. My wife and i were having a great time sending pics, voice recordings, etc. and it showed the gps also. But in the real world when i am at work and she sends me something, am i supposed to keep opening the Palringo App to see if someone sent me something. All of the features specially i like this 3 *Send voice messages at the click of a button so your friends can hear your voice. *Show your buddies what you’re looking at by sharing photos and pictures in chats. *See where your friends are right now with location and let everyone know where you are. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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