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Instant
Messenger On-The-Go
By Spencer Goad
Now days
many people use Instant Messaging (IM) to communicate on a daily basis.
I know I personally often use IM more than I will use the phone. Companies
are now adopting it for internal communications, as it is quicker and
cheaper than using a phone in many ways.
But now the
Tablet PC has come on the scene… this keyboard dominated world of IM is
one of the Tablet PC's weaknesses, as it can be time consuming to use
the input panel for what has been a text only way to communicate.
Recently,
Microsoft has made great improvements in this area with ink support in
MSN Messenger 6 (MSN IM) and Windows Messenger 5. However, most other
IM clients (AOL, ICQ, Yahoo) are still behind in this category. This has
pretty well forced me to make the move to using MSN Messenger almost exclusively.
I still use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), but only because I still have
contacts there that don't use MSN IM.
As we continue
to become more and more mobile, and start depending on wireless connections
more and more, I think it is crucial for some of these other IM titans
to provide for on-the-go use. Otherwise, I think they will just be handing
the IM competition to Microsoft.
Companies
are going to want to adopt both IM and the Tablet PC technology, and obviously
each solution they use will need to work with the other. MSN IM handles
this well, not only with its ability to send ink messages, but also its
audio/video conferencing abilities. People can communicate with ink and
write diagrams and text, and they can talk to and even see the person
they are communicating with. All of this can be done away from a desk,
from anywhere they happen to be (provided they have an internet connection).
This provides
many advantages over phone based communication (When was the last time
you sent an ink diagram to someone while looking at and talking to them
on the phone?), and I think will only increase the attractiveness of IM
and Tablet PC technology in the future.
So now I'm
asking AOL and other IM providers… where is your ink support? Where is
your audio and webcam support (that actually works!)? I used to love what
AIM could do for me… but what it can do hasn't changed that much in the
last few years. Microsoft has won me over there, not only because of ink
support, but because they are simply bringing more IM innovations for
the mobile computer user than anyone else.
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