Yamigo

From Freepedia

Yamigo is a free service that allows instant messaging on mobile phones.

To use it, your phone and network must support wireless-data (like GPRS etc) but your network operator does not need to have official support for instant messaging.

Once registered, Yamigo users can use their mobile phones to text-talk with each other, and they can also chat with their buddies on Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. Yamigo supports importing buddy lists from those services automatically.

It is based on a protocol called Wireless Village, developed by the Open Mobile Alliance, which is a joint venture between Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and many other mobile device manufacturers (over 200 in total).

Certain models of phones from these manufacturers are now available that include a chat client that can access the Yamigo network. These include (but are not limited to):

  • Nokia 3220, 3230, 6020, 6220, 6230, 6630, 6820, 6230, 5140, 6810, 7200, 7260, 7270, 7610
  • Motorola V500, V600, E398
  • Sony Ericsson T637, T630, K300i, K500i, K700i, K750i, W800i, S700i, Z1010, T206, V800
  • Siemens SK65

On Nokia, the chat client is accessed via the "My Presence" menu. On Sony-Ericsson, it's called "’My Friends". On Motorola, it's called "IM". The phones' chat clients are generally designed to be provider neutral, so you have to put in Yamigo's settings.

If your phone isn't listed, you might still be able to get a third-party chat client that is compatible with the Yamigo network. According to the Yamigo site, you need to look for one which is "IMPS compliant presence-enabled".

Yamigo can integrate with the Yahoo, MSN, AIM and ICQ chat networks. When you first sign up for a Yamigo account on their website, you can put in your username and password for each of those networks, and Yamigo will retrieve your list of contacts.

Alternatively, you can just be a Yamigo member, which would allow you to keep your 'mobile' instant messenger contacts separate from your 'PC' contacts.

Cheaper than using SMS

The big benefit of using a service like Yamigo is that it allows you to avoid the high costs of using SMS to chat with people. For example, most mobile networks in Australia charge about $A0.25 per SMS ($US0.18) per SMS. Each SMS allows you to send 160 characters.

However, consider that a kilobyte allows you to send 1024 characters, and some mobile networks have GPRS access plans that let you pay-as-you-go, per kilobyte. For example, Australian mobile network Optus has a Wireless Internet Plan which costs $A0.055 per kilobyte - just a little over half a cent for 1024 characters.

When choosing a GPRS provider, research carefully whether there is a 'flagfall' fee applied each time you connect to GPRS. This can make GPRS dramatically more expensive than it otherwise appears.

Many networks around the world also now have fixed-monthly-fee unlimited GPRS plans which makes Yamigo usage effectively free, assuming you already have the all-you-can-eat GPRS plan for another purpose.

A warning to Motorola phone users

Yamigo warns Motorola users that data usage is 10 times higher than on Nokia and Sony-Ericsson. From their website:

"We would like to stress the fact that we see a benefit in using some chat clients over others. For example, most of the existing Nokia and Ericsson phones use a compressed version of the data exchange protocol, known as WBXML, while Motorola chat clients use plain XML. Motorola generate data transfers ten times higher than Nokia and Sony-Ericsson phones."

How to find out more and configure your phone

For other brands of mobiles and to find out more from other users on the service, there is a Yamigo forum.

You can connect to Yamigo via both WAP and internet. However, not all networks provide all customers with internet access - just WAP. And to further confuse things, not all phones will connect reliably to Yamigo over WAP. So configuration could involve a bit of trial and error.

The Yamigo sign up page is where you select how frequently your phone polls the Yamigo network. Because it is a client-server protocol, sending messages to your contacts is fast, but receiving them depends on how quickly you set your phone to poll the Yamigo network. The fastest seems to be two minutes, but what is not explained is how much data it uses to poll each time, which obviously has important cost implications. Another question that would be worthy of investigation is what the battery-life implication of your phone doing GPRS activity every few minutes is.

Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Yamigo.html"


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