BeeJiveIM 3.0 review

BeeJiveIM 3.0 allows you access all the major IM services - MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and Facebook - on your iPhone. Previously, this kind of activity was restricted to the house, usually your bedroom, as a PC was required to access these services. However, now you can do it anywhere you like thanks to BeeJiveIM 3.0, which means you’ll spend even more time fiddling with your iPhone when you should be forming meaningful relationships with people, or paying attention to where you’re walking.

BeeJiveIM is the ultimate application for Messenger junkies as it allows you to chat to multiple people from multiple IM accounts at the same time. During testing we fired up Facebook, Myspace, MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo! Chat, which all worked seamlessly and without a hint of lag.

Overall, BeeJiveIM is significantly better than almost every other IM application we’ve used. Mainly because it runs seamlessly even when you have up to five IM accounts open, but also because you have the ability to send and receive image and audio files. In this sense, BeeJiveIM is very similar to the IM experience you get on a PC, which is always a good thing.

Once you have a chat open, your conversation is played out in speech bubbles and you have the option to switch to landscape-mode to make typing easier. During testing we found it significantly easier to use landscape mode, particularly when you have multiple conversations going on. Another nice feature of BeeJiveIm is that you can toggle between conversations by shaking the iPhone - although, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds.

While there are a few things missing from BeeJiveIM, such as emoticons, hyperlinked text, and the ability to send attachments, it really doesn’t detract from the overall chatting experience that much, and you certainly won’t lose any sleep over it. That said, the BeeJiveIM developers have promised that all these missing aspects will eventually be available in future updates.

Setting up multiple accounts on BeeJiveIM 3.0 is an absolute breeze. You simply tab the accounts tab, pick out which one you’d like to use, then enter you log-in details - simple. Another nice touch of BeeJiveIM is that you can set multiple status’ across multiple accounts, so you can be ‘Away’ on one, ‘Offline’ on another, and ‘Busy’ on the next, which means you only have to talk to the people you want to.

If you’re extremely popular and have hundreds of contacts who always seem to be online, and incessantly bother you, then you can build yourself a Buddy List, which essentially allows you to “cut-out” the dross, and chat to the people you actually want to - and all without blocking anyone. This is an incredibly useful aspect of the application, because even if you’ve got 600 friends on your collective accounts, you probably only talk to about 0.001 per cent of them, and this way you can have these “special” individuals in a place where they’re always accessible.

Push also works seamlessly within BeeJiveIm so you’ll always be up-to-date, even when the application is closed, which is one of the strongest aspects of this application as many other IM apps on the Apps Store are frankly useless in this respect.

All in all, this is a thoroughly accomplished application that does everything you’d expect and more. During testing we found it incredibly hard to find any problems with BeeJiveIM as it did everything so well, and even chucked in a few bonuses we weren’t expecting, such as sending and receiving images and audio files.

However, there is one problem... At £5.99 BeeJiveIM’s price tag is bordering on extortion...