Yamigo

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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, 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 of 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.

[edit] Cheaper than using SMS

The big benefit of using a service like Yamigo is that it allows you to avoid the higher 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. Some GPRS providers charge a 'flagfall' fee 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.

[edit] 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."