Hijinks Reviews: Fring

Pros: Hands down one of the best apps for the iPhone. Period. First to bring native Skype support for Wi-Fi calling. Replaces the need for running three or four chat apps.
Cons: Leaving it running in the background does shorten battery life. Doesn’t play nice with your tunes.

Platform: iPod Touch and iPhone

Developed by: fringland ltd (www.fring.com)

I was fairly impressed with iChabber, which was the first app to bring working GoogleTalk support to the platform, but I have to say Fring makes iChabber look like a toy. Both in terms of ease of use and available features.

Continued after the jump…

With a robust feature set, and working support for Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, SIP, GoogleTalk, Twitter, Yahoo, and AIM this is easily one of the best apps I’ve seen for the iPhone to date. Configuring it is childsplay, no need to add server information like in iChabber, just tap on the service you want to sign into, input your username and password, and hit Subscribe.

Within a minute of installing Fring I had it configured to use my GoogleTalk, MSN Messenger, and Twitter accounts. As far as a Twitter client goes, it’s lacking, but I can forgive that. Twitter is merely listed as a buddy on your universal buddylist, to update your feed you just click chat and send it a message, simple enough, but no ability to follow other feeds may be a problem for some.

It should also be noted that you will have to sign up for a free fring account the first time you launch the app, it only takes two seconds.

One feature I’d like to see is the ability to add your own chat server to the list, such as a Jabber account. IRC support would be a huge plus as well.

Hitting the Home button only hides Fring, in order to exit you have to hit Exit and confrim that you wish to close the app. If you leave Fring running, it will show a IM count for missed/waiting messages, which is quite handy.

Selecting a contact from your buddy list presents you with the choice of either calling or chatting with them.

The chat and call interfaces are pretty basic, but they work well.

As with any software there are a few bugs:

• Launching Fring for instanace kills your music if you have it playing, you can resume listening after Fring loads though.
• It will notify you with a shrill tone when a new message arrives and it’s running in the background, the problem with this is again, the music stops playing and doesn’t start back up… Oh, and the difference in volume is likely to kill you if you’re using headphones.
• When selecting a contact from your buddylist it shows you the Call and Chat options even if their client doesn’t support calling, it’d be nice if it only showed options that were supported.

Even though it’s a little rough around the edges, I stand by my opinion that it’s one of the greatest apps for the iPhone. Do yourself a favor and download it.

I can’t vouch for how it works on the iPod touch, since the lack of microphone means no VoIP support. If you’ve tried it, give me a shout.