Yamigo

Yamigo is a free service, based in Finland, that allows instant messaging on mobile phones.

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

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, 6021, 6220, 6230, 6630, 6820, 6230, 5140, 6810, 7200, 7260, 7270, 7610
• Motorola V500, V600, E398, V3 RAZR
• Sony Ericsson T637, T630, K300i, K500i, K610i, K700i, K750i, W800i, W810i, W880i, W890i, 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. Other phones need 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".

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, after sign-up with Yamigo 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.

You can connect to Yamigo via both WAP and internet. However, 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 it is unclear 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 high GPRS activity.

The service seems to have been abandoned sometime late 2005. There have been no new developments or news since the last Upgrade for Version .19 in April 2005. The administrator of the forums never answers any questions. The service is now very spotty, with complains such as:

• users that are online being shown as offline;
• no messages being delivered to the phone.