![]() ![]() Tap and hold a chat bubble to bring up the copy prompt. Making use of iPhone OS 3.0’s other big-deal feature, Beejive 3.0 now ties in to the iPhone’s copy/paste system. Next time you tap on the meta contact, Beejive will open a conversation with the first currently signed on account in the list. Tie any accounts belonging to your split-screen-named friend into the one meta contact, then reorder the accounts within the contact to your liking. Merged names come together into one listing called a “Meta contact”. Presumably influenced by the much lauded contacts system of the Palm Pre, Beejive allows you to link multiple IM names to one buddy. As a result, a good chunk of people have a bunch of accounts for any given service, allowing them to separate their work buddies from their play buddies, or just keep their “HotLatinaQueen69” screen name private outside of those lucky few who you knew before you realized what a terrible mistake the name was. Notifications are tweakable to some extent while you can’t change that sound that plays, you can toggle the sound, badge icon, or the notification pop-up individually.īeginning a few years ago, most major IM clients began allowing for multiple accounts to be signed in simultaneously. ![]() Back on the iPhone home screen, the Beejive app icon has a small badge that indicates how many messages are waiting for you. When a message arrives while Beejive isn’t in the foreground, a (surprisingly pleasant) sound plays and the notification window pops up, displaying the text of the last message you received. Notifications work well, arriving just a second or so after the message is sent. Once the person responds, you’ll be alerted and offered a way to quickly jump to the conversation. With background notifications flipped on, Beejive 3.0 now seems like a full-fledged alternative to IM’ing on the PC. On any PC client, we say something and then go do something else while we wait for that person to respond. You could keep your iPhone locked onto the IM app at all times, but that’s not how we’ve trained ourselves to use IM. After all, it’s pretty tough to have a conversation with someone when you’ve got no idea whether or not they’ve said anything to you. You can also set Beejive to automatically log you off if you’ve gone a certain length of time without opening up the app.įor most users, IM clients are the key justification for background notifications. While platform limitations keep Beejive from running in the background on the iPhone, Beejive’s servers will keep you connected (and handle the background notifications) until you sign off. As of 3.0, Beejive supports AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN/Windows Live, Myspace IM, Yahoo! Messenger, and Facebook IM. Outside of Skype, Beejive supports most of the big IM services. Update: As of 12:10 PM on June 18th, it’s not available yet It took a few days longer than expected for OS 3.0 to go live and for Beejive to get approved, but we’re told it should be live in the app store by the time this review goes up (if it hasn’t already). As we’d found out back in early June, Beejive has had their 3.0-friendly app ready to go for some time. Yesterday, iPhone OS 3.0 came along and swept all our background-notification-worries away. Its largest fault was the lack of background notifications (otherwise known as “Push notifications”), and as any good blog reader should know well by now, such limitations were due to Apple’s shortcomings. ![]() It wasn’t perfect – but it was one of the few IM clients I’d turn to on a regular basis. With that in mind, know this: We love Beejive 3.0 on the iPhone.Īs past reviews would indicate, I’ve been a fan of Beejive for a while. Be they slow, flakey, or just outright terribly designed, we’ve grown to have a nearly unshakable bias against them. We see a whole lot of phones go in and out of the MobileCrunch office, each generally toting its own crappy, broken instant messaging suite. Before we start review, there’s something I have to admit: I hate most mobile IM clients.
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