Yep, Windows Live Messenger is now available on Apple iPhone. Launched a week ago, it took only 5 days to reach 1 million of downloads. As an ardent user of both iPhone and Messenger, I am delighted with this announcement and immediately downloaded and tried it. This is an engineered plan behind Hotmail, Messenger and Windows Live called Messenger Connect (Beta). Like any usual marketing hype, Messenger Connect is being told to us that it allows users to communicate, share, and connect with their Messenger friends on other websites with its flexible, yet prescriptive set of APIs to help create intuitive bla bla bla stuffs. Usual stuffs. In short, it’s just another form of Twitter or Facebook being attached along with internet messenger and email functions. With that being said, your statuses on your Messenger is now acting like Twitter statuses that will be updated on your Live page every time you changed it. It has been that way since before Twitter but nobody seemed to care about it until Twitter. To put it simply, Twitter is more accessible on universal browsers rather than limited availability of Windows Live Messenger application  on Windows operating systems. Well, there’s Messenger for Mac but it sucks badly that nobody bothers to use it. Exactly, what makes this Messenger is so awesome?

First page, the Social tab

Multi session. Multi session is something makes Live Messenger great as it allows multiple sign ins on different platforms. With that being said, it was previous only available for Windows platforms. You can do the same on iPhone now. So, yeah, unlike that sucky Yahoo! Messenger that couldn’t have multi session which I had to create another account for office while the main one stay online at home, now I can sign in with my main account of Live Messenger on iPhone and chat with my friends. You also can change your display picture and your current availability being Available, Busy, Away and Appear Offline.

Tab 2, Friends online with grouping that you have set before

Tab 3, chats

Tab 4, photos that you can upload from your phone

So, how does the chatting experience with Windows Live Messenger on iPhone feel like? Well, it’s just like any chatting done on iPhone haha…

Some chats

Sharing pictures

My cat :3

Loading it up

Pretty much like any normal internet conversation, aye? Tho’ you can have your keypad changed to other international keys, let say, Japanese keyboard, over your conversation easily on iPhone.

However, there are still a lot of stuffs needed to be fixed and improved. First, whenever I signed in my account on iPhone, my nickname immediately changed to name that I set earlier on my Live account rather than what I set on my Windows Live Messenger on the PC. You can’t change your information on iPhone like your nickname here as you can only change your avatar, availability and status. Also, whenever you changed your status on iPhone, it will changed your statuses on other devices too. Second, there’s a bug with the avatar that being used. Despite I chose an avatar on iPhone, the others won’t see it. I can understand for it not syncing but with the your friend on other PC and you tried to chat with them, your avatar that you have set on your phone won’t be displayed. I believe this is because of multi session stuff. In addition to avatar problems, animated avatar will be static. But at least it shows static image rather than empty avatar like that icky Messenger for Mac. Understandable as it might reduce memory and bandwidth usage (optimization) for iPhone. Third, group chats are not available on iPhone. I love group chats. Easier to leave messages to other friends in case the others not online. But not on iPhone. Again, this is for optimization on iPhone and also related with the Fourth problem which is custom emoticons. The only available emoticons are the pre-made emoticons with Messenger. Yeah,  yeah, yeah, reducing memory, whatever, since I actually have more than 100 custom ones on my PC. Other unavailabilities for iPhone are Winks, Nudge, Voice Clip, Changing Background, Handwriting/Drawing, and… Webcam or Video call I guess. But since I am using 3GS, not iPhone 4, this is stupid anyway.

Although with all stuffs that I have stated above that needed to be improved, it’s quite good actually especially that multi session function. Of course you can’t sharing files other than photos but that’s good enough. With Messenger Connect to be available together on Xbox platform, this will connect more people who in the office, on mobile and also at home playing games.

For the time being, Microsoft actually recognize Apple iPhone as a superior phone as their Windows Phone 7 haven’t being released yet… tehehehe. Other phone users might be relying on that puny e-Buddy app on your Android or Symbian without multi session.