Contacts on Ovi from Nokia as mobile IM client
I used many different IM software on my mobile phones, including Morange, Talkonaut, Fring, Nimbuzz and others that are not so popular. Till now, Fring is the one I used most.
Now there is another choice, Contacts on Ovi from Nokia. The different between Contacts on Ovi and third part programs is that it is from Nokia, the mobile phone manufacturing giant. This fact make users like me expect better integration with the system, better reliability and better performance. But how does it work in reality?
First of all, Contacts on Ovi integrates with the system well on some aspects: Users can access it via the tab next to the normal contacts menu; users can send their location to their friends on Ovi, which can be displayed on Nokia Maps. Users can see the status of their friends on Ovi is on phone when they are making normal call. But I didn’t find a convenient way to import the local contacts information on my mobile phone or the address book synchronized to my Ovi account.
Second, Contacts on Ovi is really more reliable than third party softwares, such as fring, Nimbuzz and so on, since it never crashed or caused my mobile phone to restart, which happened with many third parts software.
Concerning performance, Contacts on Ovi starts pretty fast and consumes much less RAM than third party programs. But as the features of Contacts on Ovi is quite limited, there is no so much requirement for its performance.
Contacts on Ovi only support Ovi or gtalk account. While many programs support various IM networks, such as MSN, AOL, Yahoo and so on, there seems to be no motivation of customer to use Contacts on Ovi. Meanwhile, Contacts on Ovi doesn’t support real time voice chat, which is already implemented by many mobile IM clients. Instead, users of Contacts on Ovi can send voice message between each other, which is only attractive when the bandwidth of data connection is very limit as the compression ratio of voice message sent by Contacts on Ovi is very high. More ridiculous, Contacts on Ovi also doesn’t support sending file and I think this should be a basic feature of today’s mobile IM client.
Just as I have already mentioned, I don’t find enough motivation for users to choose Contacts on Ovi instead of other third party software. Maybe the consideration about relationship with mobile network operators is preventing Nokia to implement feature like realy time voice chat. Anyhow, Nokia still has a lot to do to make Contacts on Ovi an attractive choice.
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