Is PingChat! for you? I hope so…

Could you live with only 200 Instant messages a month? My wife and I have been and when she went over a few months ago, it cost us $22 for her to tell me stuff like: Be home soon! Love you! What should we do for dinner? and of course a few LOL’s!

The “Love you” text is arguably worth any price, however is skating by on our $5 a month texting plans vs. the $15 for 1500 or $20 for unlimited texts worth our going over every once in a while?

I personally don’t text enough to justify $10-15 extra a month, but we don’t want the extremely high overage costs to pop up unexpectedly either.

Enter: PingChat!

We started using PingChat in it’s early stages as a solution to send free SMS texts to each other on our iPhones. I only had one other friend who used PingChat at the time. When PingChat announced it’s new cross-platform capabilities to communicate seamlessly with the iPhone and now both Android and Blackberry, I wanted to go to the top of the nearest mountain and shout it out loud for all to hear.

This is where I ran into problems. My cries fell on deaf ears. The biggest problems? PingChat requires downloading a new client that uses yet another user name. Secondly, the tagline on their website (http://www.pingchat.com/) is a little misleading. “PingChat! 2.0 – Instant Messaging used by millions!”  I don’t think of its service as instant messaging because they don’t have a computer-based client. However, you can’t just ping someone’s phone number, which is more akin to text messaging, instead they need the app and to create a PingChat! “id” like AIM, Yahoo, etc.

Since it’s considered Instant Messaging, even if only self proclaimed by PingChat!, how is it any different from instant message clients? I have to admit, I am late to the show when it comes to mobile instant messaging, so I needed to get moving on a client to find out. I already had Meebo, an instant message client aggregator, installed so I added my AIM and Yahoo accounts to give it a try. The pros of this is that I finally can go surfing and act like I’m still working and no one would really know until my iPhone gets too waterlogged to use. The downside? You have to be signed in to appear online and receive messages. Some apps can be set to be “always on” but for me, that means managing my availability status on different platforms which can lead to user error.

With PingChat!, there is no signing in. You get messages as they are received with push notification and there’s no availability status settings to worry about.

So here’s the lowdown on PingChat! It is instant messaging mobile app with no messaging fees, once you install it on your mobile device. It has some cool features – including group chat, picture/video/contacts/location sending, notification of when the other person reads the text and is great for those that want to do free international texting. Further, it’s available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry smart phones.

http://www.pingchat.com/

With Instant Messaging available and prolific, many people could reduce the need for an expensive text messaging plan, especially if using a specific program with your family, friends and closest colleagues. Not everyone is going to jump on the PingChat! bandwagon especially if they have unlimited texting messaging plans. And the flipside of using an Instant Messaging client to reach people on their mobiles is, it’s hard to remember who has what program on their phone and whether you should Skype or IM, or text someone.

For now, PingChat! works to save me texting some texting fees. Please download it and use it so I can lower my wife’s texting plan, which I discovered while writing this has ballooned like teenage textaholic.