With society pushing us to be online and available in our every waking moment, it is hardly surprising that there are a plethora of instant messaging programs available for PDAs and mobile phones. IM+ offers connection to a wide range of networks without becoming too bloated or over-complex. The first thing we noticed after installing IM+ was the simplicity of its user interface. As soon as the program opens, you can get to work configuring your accounts. IM+ lets you access the popular MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, AOL (AIM), Jabber and Google Talk networks, meaning that whoever you need to stay in touch with, IM+ will be able to help you out.

On Windows applications featuring such a range of connectivity, it’s normal to see a complex list of options when the configuration process starts. IM+ simplifies the process of setting up your accounts, and beyond message alerts, contains practically no options to configure. This may put off more advanced users who enjoy tinkering with their accounts but we thought it was a good move on the part of Shape Services (IM+’s creators). The only problem we noticed when setting up our account details was that the ‘backspace’ key on our device’s touch screen keyboard didn’t work. This is of course a small issue, but it slowed us down when we made a mistake.

The contact list display (or ‘Roster’) in IM+ should be immediately recognisable to anyone who’s used an instant messenger service before. Giving you the choice of whether to view all your contacts or just those online, IM+ also sorts your contacts by groups if requested. Selecting an online contact immediately initiates a chat with them, while the holding your stylus on the contact will provide some limited options referring to that contact, such as ‘rename’, ‘delete’ and ‘info’. We were disappointed that ‘info’ didn’t try to display a contact’s full profile rather than just their email address. We thought that a more full extract of the contact’s online profile would have been useful, at least including their birthday, homepage and interests.

Entering the text for sending messages was simple enough. As usual, we found the Transcriber feature to be the easiest and most accurate method of text entry, but this is very much a matter of personal preference for the individual user. IM+ also allows you to copy and paste text from other applications into your chat window; particularly useful if you’re using the program to collaborate on a work project, or even just to send your friend a link. IM+ also supports the most popular emoticons for instant messaging, for those times when words just can’t convey your feelings.

Up against some stiff competition, IM+ is an excellent chat program for your Pocket PC. While it has a couple of small issues and omissions, it is easy to use, relatively small and very stable. In other words, an excellent way of staying in contact even when you’ve got a good excuse not to!

Download IM+ (IMPlus) 8.0.1 in Softonic

Specifically, Slick lets you connect and communicate with friends on ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM and MSN Messenger. Besides just sending and receiving messages you can also add emoticons (not enough to choose from for my liking though), change your status and add new contacts.

Slick's interface is not too taxing to find your way around and owes much of its design to the popular IM clients. Thankfully, it also brings with it some of the more advanced features of these clients too, including the ability to share files, view chat history, and set up all manner of alerts.

If you're looking for a no-nonsense way of chatting with your IM contacts on the bus then Slick provides a, well, slick, means of doing so.

Download Slick 0.63 in Softonic

Making long distance or international calls from your mobile phone can be so expensive that it's almost better to not stay in touch. Install Nimbuzz on your Pocket PC, and you'll be able to talk to people all over the World for free - at least in theory.

Nimbuzz allows you to make calls, chat online, exchange instant messages and send files from your phone for free. The application pulls all your contacts together in one place, so you can exchange messages with all your friends on networks such as MSN, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, Facebook, or MySpace.

The user interface combines all of your contacts from all these various networks into one place, and you can see who is online at any time. If you want to get someone's attention, you simply 'buzz' them, and Nimbuzz will be launched on their phone.

Of course, all this talk of 'free' long distance calls and messaging is a little misleading. That's because you'll still get charged for Internet access when using Nimbuzz. This is fine if you're using a WiFi connection or if you have a flat-rate data plan, but if you pay for data by the Mb then using Nimbuzz could work out to be very costly if you're not careful.

However, if you have a flat-rate plan, Nimbuzz makes for a fun and cheap way to stay in touch with friends and family around the World.

Download Nimbuzz 1.2 in Softonic

When I was a boy, the only way of getting in touch with someone was to phone them up, write them a letter, or go to their house. These days though, there are countless different new ways to communicate thanks to email, instant messaging, VoIP, social networks, and the like.

This is great, but it does pose problems in that it's often difficult to work out the best way to reach someone. You might have separate buddy lists for Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo!, MSN, and Facebook, and constantly logging in, launching apps and finding your online pals can be a real chore. fring is designed to change all that, providing you with a single platform, based on your mobile, where all of your online friends are available in one place.

fring supports most of the major chat services including Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Yahoo!, and AIM. You can also use the program to check Facebook updates, view Twitter feeds, and even listen to music with friends on Last.fm.

fring is simple to install and set up. Once you've registered for a fring account you can import your online contacts very easily. You just go to the 'Add-ons' section, click a service you want to access (e.g. Skype, Yahoo!) and sign in using your normal log-in for that account. The contacts are automatically pulled into fring and displayed in the main window, and you can quickly view who is online and who isn't.

Not only can you chat via instant messages but fring also lets you make cheap or free calls to your buddies via SkypeOut/SkypeIn. This means you can ring people from your phone's contacts locally or internationally, at vastly reduced rates. Of course, you'll need to be in a WiFi hotspot for this to be of any benefit but thankfully, fring comes with a tool for automatically logging you into your favorite hotspots.

There are a few extra chat features of note within fring, such as file transfer and a history view. However, its functionality is still vastly inferior to what you'd expect from most of the chat services themselves. For instance, there are no emoticons, games, video conferencing, etc.

Overall though, fring makes for a great way to manage all of your contacts on all of your networks from one, easy-to-use application.

Download fring 3.40 Beta in Softonic

If you're bored of talking on phone and want a different way to communicate using your device then try imov Messenger.

The application is designed to allow you to chat with friends and family via IM, using your phone's Internet connection. imov Messenger is compatible with all the major instant messaging networks, including Google Talk, AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger. It also supports Jabber clients, so you can communicate with people on private networks.

Setting up imov Messenger is a fairly painless process and thankfully there is a setup wizard to guide you through the account configuration procedure. Once you've got past this stage you'll be taken to the main interface which I found a little too clumsy for my liking. The options at the bottom are strangely placed and the icons are poorly designed.

That said, once you've got used to where everything is in imov Messenger, you'll discover it's actually a pretty powerful messaging clients. It boasts some neat features such as offline message queuing, SOCKS5 proxy server support, and can be configured to offer location-based services. I'm also a big fan of the 'QuickPhrase' function, which offers a fast way of inserting commonly-used expressions without having to type. Unfortunately, the emoticon support in imov Messenger isn't great, and there doesn't seem to be a pop-up where you can choose from a range of smilies.

On the whole though, imov Messenger offers powerful IM capabilities for your phone.

Download imov Messenger 2.33 in Softonic

Agile Messenger is the world's premier mobile MSN®, ICQ®, AIM®, and Yahoo!® instant messaging client. Innovative features include our patent pending Push to Talk technology which enables users to send voice messages from mobile to mobile and mobile to PC.

Agile Messenger features include:

• sending and receiving instant messages
• Unicode and BIG5 support for international characters
• split screen messaging interface
• separate tabs for each conversation
• conversation history
• smiley support
• automatic download and updating of the contact list
• contact status information and presence management
• adding, removing, renaming contacts
• data usage counter
• auto update downloader and installer
• picture messaging with camera support
• "Today" plug-in

Download Agile Messenger 3.85 in Softonic

From time to time you may need to take screen grabs of your Pocket PC, for instance, if you want to report a fault to a tech support site or present a tutorial or software presentation for someone.

The program works in a different way to many Pocket PC screen-grabbing tools in that it has no user interface to speak of. Instead, you activate the grabbing feature by clicking on the program icon (a little strange, because doing so only grabs the Start menu screen or Applications menu).

Again, there's no option for changing the destination within MPSnapshots.