theregoesdave

After having been in existence for just over a year, Palringo is on it’s way to becoming the top free mobile instant messenger on the market. After Sage reviewed the Palringo client for Windows Mobile back in February, it became our instant messenger of choice. AIM for Windows Mobile also provides an excellent user experience for free, but only for AIM and I might be a bit biased as an AOLer myself. Their smooth interface, flawless support for all the major IM networks and Push-to-talk voice features are all useful and well implemented.

Palringo also launched a free Blackberry client last month to little fanfare. It runs on the Blackberry Curve, Pearl and 8800 models. I’ll have to admit that I’m not quite as knowledgeable about the landscape for free Blackberry IM clients, but it’s still a relatively young market as many mobile im clients are either subscription-based to the carriers or per-license fee.

They haven’t released a launch date for the iPhone version of Palringo, but I stumbled across some screenshots that I’ve included below. I was really looking for Blackberry screenshots, so you can imagine my surprise. The interface looks really clean and they seem to have found a way to manage switching conversations by a small finger-friendly menu that you can bring up from the bottom.

Check out screenshots after the jump

Overall, I think Palringo might be the best free IM client that nobody has heard of… yet. They’ve put out versions for Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and basically any Java phone like a RAZR, not including this upcoming iPhone release. So spread the word- these folks are doing rock solid work and giving us professional grade IM solutions- for free!

• Palringo: Free Mobile IM Client
• Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta: Putting Users First
• Inside Look at the Free Mobile AIM Beta for Windows Mobile