It was only a few days ago that we tore into the 20 dollar IM+ application for being overpriced, buggy, and lacking anything that justified that 20 dollar price tag. At the tail-end of that review, we expressed our hopes that an IM app done right would come along soon. Enter Meebo for Android, brought to you by the same people behind the awesome browser-based IM application of the same name. It’s got a clean interface, is dead simple to use, and best of all: it’s FREE. Game over, IM+.
Meebo is a true replacement for Android’s out-of-the-box IM client, supporting simultaneous logins for AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, and Jabber. Through a day of fairly rigorous testing, Meebo ran smoothly in the background without any notable hiccups. I always fear that I’ll miss an important IM when a chat app decides to silently off itself – fortunately, Meebo plops an icon onto Android’s notification bar as an “Ongoing” alert, providing a bit of constant reassurance. Just like the taskbar on your computer, Meebo’s icon will reflect if you have messages and display them for a short time to see if they are worth replying to.
For a first release, it’s already well on its way in the right direction. The only gripe we have at the moment is the lack of configuration options for away messages, notifications.. or anything else, for that matter. With that said, it still obliterates IM+ and the default IM application on Android. Check it out on the Android Market and give it a whirl!