Choosing the Best Instant Messenger for Mobiles

In the Smartphone obsessed world we live in, more and more people are communicating through web based IMs like WhatsApp, Skype, WeChat etc. IMs have revolutionized the way we connect now and is the most rapidly adopted form of communication. Instant Messaging is presence enabled messaging service designed to communicate across various cross platform users viz Android, iOS, Windows, and Blackberry. Message transfer over IMs is faster and as soon as you hit send it appears on recipients screen. All the popular IMs are available freely on all platforms to download, install and use. They work with your internet rather than mobile network which means you can communicate freely over these without bearing any additional costs of service provider. With IM you can send Messages, share files, images, videos, web links directly to one another or in a group. Some of them also feature Video Calling. Another interesting feature of IM does include location sharing by which you can share and know where all your closed ones are at that moment of time. Today, these mobile messengers are actively being used by consumers to communicate, share jokes, and to generally have a good time. However, they can also be considered by organizations to save communication costs, just as public chat clients like Yahoo Messenger and MSN were used a few years ago. They allow users to create groups and collaborate on projects without physically traveling to other locations. If you have not tried an IM, then you are surely losing on a whole new world of communication. As technology advances rapidly, these IMs expand their capabilities to a whole new level. With IMs you can have strong social media presence everywhere among friends, family or co-workers and get connected with them at any time regardless of location.

From an enterprise point of view, few things are as important in business as effective communication and IMs offer a lot of advantages. With IMs you can make a virtual video conference without getting to wait for people who are on other sites and can share ideas. All this increases productivity, saves time and costs incurred. Also when on a business trip you can easily be in touch with everyone inside the enterprise.

However, some issues that enterprises may face with excessive use of IMs is consumption of their network bandwidth as almost all individuals use IM whether inside or outside the organization to share files, images and videos. Another misuse of IMs an enterprise can face is in the form of viruses these IMs can carry from outside world as not all IMs have necessary security measures. Employee's productivity can be reduced as they will use IMs to chat with friends and family members during working hours.

Though IM are most adopted form of communication in today's scenario, a number of related issues are security of message that are being transferred, memory bandwidth consumed, CPU performance, and battery drainage. These issues have to be addressed carefully by IM developers to create a much powerful and convenient mobile communication experience.