First Looks: BeeJive for iPhone

Too pricey for me. I will wait for other applications that are either free or not that expensive.

Push simply provides the application developers the ability to alert you on your phone (directly via the application, not via the SMS or email alert band-aids currently in place) that the application wants your attention. In the case of IM applications, that alert would indicate you've received a message. Currently there's no way to accomplish this untill Apple opens up the push service, hence the SMS or email band-aid alert situation in the meantime.

As for always on, it's pretty simple, yet people are apparently still failing to comprehend it. Yeah, there's free and cheaper IM alternatives on the iPhone but virtually NONE of them (short of MobileChat) have the potential to keep your IM accounts online indefinitely, and to do so they need back-end architecture (servers) to accomplish it - it has absolutely nothing to do with Push or anything Apple will offer.

$16 is expensive but it's the price one pays for what could effectively be considered a lifetime "subscription" to use their servers to maintain 24/7 IM client connectivity. Needless to say the free clients don't offer this, simply disconnecting your IM account when you quiet the program , or shortly thereafter.

Servers and back-end architecture don't come free, so nobody should ever expect to see always-on IM clients appear for free either. If all you want is intermittent IM connectivity, then use one of the multitude of regular (free) IM clients out there, but if actually staying connected all the time even when the app isn't open, then you need a solution like Beejive or Mobilechat, and should be prepared to pay for it.

I'm sorry... this drumbeat of "IM must be free!" is tiresome. I don't know if you knew it, but always-on IM existed long before the iPhone came along. And just because the App Store features free apps, other platforms have had those too. I can honestly say that there have been few free IM apps that ever bucked the notion that you get what you pay for... and are usually only possible when subsidized by some other fee-based service.

As multi-IM applications go, $16 isn't a lot. Heck, Beejive charge $20 for the similar app on Blackberry. And I've paid much more than this in the past for PalmOS IM applications. I don't understand what the big deal is about $16 here.

so, i think what i'm missing out of this review is a better understanding of what "push notifications" mean for the iPhone. i had thought that this was a feature Apple planned to implement for *all* apps (and through their own servers, rather than through those of individual developers).

is the implementation of "push notifications" through BeeJive an example of the Apple-promised feature, or is this something that BeeJive is taking its own initiative in offering?

this is relevant, i think, because if Apple still has yet to implement their own "push notifications", isn't it safe to assume that prettymuch *every* AIM app in the App Store is going to have this "24/7 connectivity" eventually?

while i'd love to be constantly connected & really appreciate this service being offered---i'm not sure if it's worth $16 to me. & i'd be rather upset to pay for BeeJive now, only to find that, say a free or lower-cost competitor can do the same "24/7 connection" after an upgrade....

At $16, I think I will just wait for AIM and Yahoo! oneConnect to add push notification support (I don't use MSN all that much).

im very happy w/ this app, i used the webapp up until this time and have 0 problem investing $16 into this product. I'll definitely get my moneys worth out of it. As an ex Sidekick user, IM is something that is important to me.

Meebo.com is a free webapp. You can sign into AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Chat and Google Talk. It supports the widescreen keyboard. If you have mobile forwarding enabled with AIM, people can IM you when you aren't on, and the messages will come to you as a text message to your phone.

Sure, there are some compromises involved with this approach, but it will also save you $16. Really, that's about $10 too expensive in my opinion.

I want this app, but I am unwilling to pay $16 for this iPhone app. Even EA charges 9.99 for their most expensive video games. This developer put no where near the amount of resources spent on Spore, Real Soccer 09, Star Wars the force unleashed, or Super Monkey Ball. This person is crazy if he thinks he's going to make a ton of money off of this relatively simple application. I'll buy it when it "goes on sale", but i'll pay no where near $16.

Whats sad is that the developer made the chatter on their app be about the price and not the features or how well it works. This is so sad.

This "coolness" of this app will not be as great once background notifications become universal on the iPhone. You won't need to pay 16 bucks to be connected 24/7.

$16? I don't need multi-client IM functionality that bad.