Ahoy there buccaneers! This old seadog has been up and about for a few months now, sailin’ the vast ocean looking for the map to the fabled fountain of youth. Well, if ye look closely at me mug, ye will see that I be needin’ a good tick tock back to me old days – the days when I could twirl the cutlass with the best of ‘em, drink rum and never go down, and wench like there was no tomorrow. Arrr!!! Those were the days. These days, I be relegated to simple commanding this Man o War looking for the next app find. And, here is what I be digging up online – the IM app Palringo.
The War of the IM Apps
Palringo is considered one of the small children amongst the big boys in the IM app world. Other IM apps like eBuddy and IMO towers high above it like a giant standing beside one of those little people. Nevertheless, what it may lack in popularity and appeal, it makes up in features. Aye, while Palringo may not be in your radar due to bad reviews in the past, it has since beefed up its portfolio with a number of new features that a lot of the big boys don’t have. But before we go to that, let’s discuss the features it had all along.
For starters, Palringo is a multi-messenger integrator. This means that you can use Palringo to connect to other networks simultaneously. Its instant messaging link ups consist of MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ, GTalk, iChat, Jabber, and Facebook. Now, Palringo has its own chat service. Hence, you can automatically add and connect to a friend with a Palringo account all the same.
Aside from that, Palringo is packed with other standard IM features such as individual and group chatting, push notification, multi-medium connectivity (Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G), tons of emoticons and alerts, and buddy list customization and management. Additionally, users may now send photos to contacts and group chat hangouts – a place where you and your buddies are always welcome in, whether any of you log out or not. Aye, these are all standard stuff that you can find in other apps.
Why Palringo?
Alright, we have completed the run down on the standard IM features, let’s look at what is cooking here that others have yet to marinade. Let’s begin with geo-location. Okay, some IM apps have these already. However, most are still in the dark. The geo-location feature allows users to tag and share where they are when they send a message – a great feature for chat conferences and other seemingly benign purposes. Aye, that may not be a big deal, so let’s continue.
Up next is the voice clips feature. Aye, this is one feature that sets Palringo apart. You can press a button to record a voice clip and send it to the contact of your choice. The contact can listen to it and send his own voice clip in response. See the back and forth – it resembles the walkie talkies of old, huh? Exactly, this allows you to speak instead of type when chatting. Unfortunately, this cool feature only works if the other person is using Palringo. If the contact is using one of the many networks allowed by Palringo, they will only receive a link to the download page of the voice clip.
The Catch
Technically, there is none. Palringo is free, it works well, and has an interface that is easy to manipulate. The only caveat, if you call it one, is that some users have reported crashes and incidents of instability of the app. While these reports have not happened to me in anyway, I have found out that deleting and reinstalling the app works well in remedying the problem.
