If you’re a regular IM user with an iPhone, chances are you’ve heard of BeeJiveIM. Long established as a top choice IM app for BlackBerry, the iPhone release rocketed up to the #2 best selling application in the iTunes Social Networking category for 2008 – even with the eye-widening $16 price tag.
On Tuesday, January 6th, BeeJive will be pushing version 2.0 of BeeJiveIM for iPhone to the iTunes App Store. We were able to get our hands on a pre-release copy of it, and we’ve brought back pictures of everything new and noteworthy.
For the sake of folks scanning the page for word of a price drop: No such luck. BeeJive IM 2.0 will continue the $15.99 tradition set forth by the original release. The good news? If you’ve already purchased BeeJiveIM 1.0, the upgrade is free.
Image transfers:
Half of the fun of IM’ing on the go is sharing what’s around you, and BeeJive 2.0 does it really well. You just tap the top bar, tap the camera icon, and then choose a photo from your library or take a new one on the spot.
Transfers function well in both directions. From PC-to-iPhone, it shows up right in the chat. From iPhone-to-PC, it defaults to sending the image as a link, though users can change it to use the protocol’s default file transfer method.
Voice Notes:
Sometimes you just don’t want to type, but a full-on phone call seems like over doing it. Like a funky offspring of Push-to-talk and IM, “Voice notes” are becoming more and more common in IM apps – and now BeeJive’s doing it. Sending a voice note is similar to sending an image – tap the top bar, tap the microphone, record, and send away.
File transfers:
In addition to image sharing, BeeJive 2.0 can also handle incoming transfers of a whole bunch of file types, rendering them properly directly within the application. So far, we’ve tested and found support for a number of audio, video, and image formats, Office documents (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), and PDFs. You can also forward on transferred files to other buddies.
Address Book Linking:
Clicking a buddy’s icon brings you to that person’s Buddy Info, which now has a “Link to Address Book Card” button. If you’re frequently calling up the friends from your Buddy List whilst IM’ing, it’ll save you a few steps and keep you from needing to leave the application.
Sound Options:
It’s trivial, but it’s a nice touch: If you don’t like the IM sounds provided by BeeJive, you can configure it to use the default AIM or Yahoo sounds instead.
Image transferring was probably the most sorely missed feature of the original release, so that alone is enough to warrant the 2.0 label, with file transferring and voice notes coming in as tremendous bonuses. While the $16 price tag seems a bit crazy when surrounded by competing products going for as little as free, we’d still positively recommend BeeJive for heavy IM’ers – with this release, it does just about everything you could want of it, and it’s still the most stable and well designed IM app of the lot.
Iam sure there would be lot of options which offer bit similar services but not charged 16$!
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Boy… that’s a random comment.
No.
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that’s like 15 mill … in one day
I haven’t bought it because of the price (12 euro or something like that), but I guess it’s really a good app to be one of the best selling on iTunes. Personally, I’m not an avid MSN user, so I’m looking forward for 4.99$ price before I would wanna tap Buy.
@Amit …their BeeJive webapp is the best IM webapp imho. And I was temted, and I am tempted even more now, to buy their appstore IM app.
I agree with you though that the price is way too high ($2.99 seems more reasonable…)
What other appstore IM app do you recommend
(I am not satisfied by the Nimbuzz and Fring IM functionality)
Try Palringo, its free.
http://www.palringo.com/
Yeah… its free with good reason…
Is Facebook chat included? I believe it was promised for a future release.
I will probably buy it at a lower price. All the other multi-messenger apps suck.
Have they been able to overcome keeping the program running in the background so you are not logged out and are notified that you have a new message when you switch applications?
no apps can run in the background on the current iPhone OS
BeeJive keeps you logged in even if you close the app. When you open the app again, you’ll still be logged in and you’ll receive your messages that were sent while the app was closed. Also, you can set Beejive to email you if you receive a message while the app is closed.
That’s a pretty cool app. Probably won’t be long until makes a similar version for less.
This IM app is the only and best iphone IM out there! I can’t wait for tuesday now!
Chat should have been native to the iphone. Android has a native chat application that works not only with Gtalk but with MSN, Yahoo and AIM as well.
It’s ridiculous that Apple couldn’t add one when IM is one of the strongest communication mediums today.
That being said, Beejive is awesome and I am a happy paying customer.
Beejive is sometimes on sale, the lowest price i saw for it was 9.99 $.
I think something in the 4-5 dollar category and I’m hitting buy.
http://www.meebo.com/iphone/
Meebo works well on the iphone and is free, although it’s web based.
i use Fring on myPhone, and it’s mediocre.
This looks good, but 16 bucks for an IM app is retarded. Since the inception of IM software the apps have been free.
Also, because the iPhone OS is the most useless crappy OS ever created, it’s impossible to have my IM app to run in the background…. which is what it should do.
crApple sucks.
Yes, but Beejive circumvents that limitation of not being able to run in the background brilliantly. You can set it to keep you logged in (on their servers) for any given amount of time after you quit the app. So your friends still see you online. The instant someone sends you a message, they will send you an email. Just have them send an email to your yahoo push email address, and it will get pushed to your phone immediately and alert you! So you can straight away launch beejive and start chatting. I have been doing that and it works great. (The email they push to you also has a button to tap on and automatically launch beejive and take you into the relevant chat).
Thing is, this software keeps you logged in for 24 hours, since the Iphone dosen’t support background processes yet. You’re not only paying for the software, but also for the use of their servers.
$16 is pretty steep, especially since Apple won’y let it run in the background. I usually recommend Meebo’s iPhone optimized (free) *web site* for casual instant messages.
JP’s point bears repeating: until Apple enables background notifications, Beejive comes the closest by keeping your IM logins “online” even when the iPhone app isn’t running, for up to 24 hours (or as long as you specify). You can then receive notifications for IMs received out-of-band, via e-mail or SMS. It’s klunky, but it allows me to know if someone IMs me when I’m out and about without requiring me to leave Beejive running on the iPhone.
Palringo does that too and its free. *shrug*
People are so cheap (all thanks to the app store’s average app price of $1…). The iPhone version of BeeJive is cheaper then the Blackberry version, and this has more features then any other IM app. This is an app worth it’s price, and I’m looking forward for this update.
Its an unfortunate side-effect of the AppStore price war which brought applications down to $0.99. Now everyone is starting to think that everything should be that price – which is just absurd.
Palringo is a free app with features like image transfer, push to talk and running on server for 3 hours.
Highly recommend it, 16$ is a big tag for IMing.
that’s too expansive.
i’m sure when people not buying anymore, they’ll decrease the price.
9.99 would be okay if they really think their app is the best
I bought it for £5.99 so $9.99
Try Palringo. It’s free and it has most of the features that BeeJimeIM has. Plus you can still be online after you quit the application, and just be notified by email.
WOW, this is holy awesome!
gotta grab it when it is out!
Matt
As someone who used their web based version, I bought this the day it came out.
Quality software is worth the price, and in this case it is the cost of a few beers/a movie/one fifth of your minimum monthly payment to AT&T…..
People, you need to grow up. You want to get paid for your work? Well, so do programmers. Get over it…
As for a great app that keeps on getting better, Beejive has that in spades. I wonder if the image/audio/text can be combined into a single message and sent to a cell phone as an MMS (since Beejive already supports SMS and this has kept me from upping my Text plan beyond the base 200)
i grabbed this from http://myfreeiphone.co.uk/wordpress pretty neat site with iphone games and videos
So is this cross platform? Can an iPhone user use all these features with a Blackberry BeeJiveIM user?
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I really love this app – despite the high price. Compared to all similar apps I tried so far, it was the only one I was actually able to use.
But there is one thing, I am really missing: Skype! Does anyone know if & when they are going to add it?
PLLEEEEEAAAAAAASSSEEEEEEEE support facebook IM sooooooon!!!! :-)
I like “Old School” as a better representation of Beejive. It really connects.
I agree with Charlie. “Old School” is a better image for the app. What brilliant programmers!! Thanks for this wonderful app. They must have great parents.
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This app was only £3.99 last week but it looks like the price has gone up again, must have been a special deal?
it will get pushed to your phone immediately and alert you! So you can straight away launch beejive and start chatting.As for a great app that keeps on getting better, Beejive has that in spades.