Windows Live Messenger hits the iPhone

There are many different Live Messenger clients out there for the iPhone but nobody saw this coming. Microsoft have launched there own official Live Messenger client and the best bit about it is that it’s free.

Now you might be saying that it’s made by Microsoft so it will be rubbish and crash alot, but I can ensure you that this has never given my iPhone the Blue Screen of Death as it were lol.

So what can we expect from this, well unlike all the other clients out there this is built to do what it does and nothing else. It brings everything that Live Messenger has on your Desktop straight to your iPhone.

So lets have a look at the features. There are 4 screens to the app. Social, Friends, Chat and Photos.

The Social screen of the app lets you view all of your friends updates, from who they are friends with, to what app they are using to log into Live messenger to what new pictures they have uploaded.

You can change what type of things you want to look at such as just stuff you have updated to just pictures people have posted.

From the Social screen you can update your status, profile pic and availability. There is even an option to view your hotmail emails.

The next tab is the friends tab and it displays all of your friends, whether they are offline, busy, available, or away. This is shown by the colour of the boarder around their profile pic, it will be green for available, red for busy, yellow for away and white for offine. The friends tab allows you to use a search box to search for people, usefully if you have millions of friends. From this tab you can even add new friends however you can not create new categories for your buddies to go in.

Now for the Chat tab, this pretty much does what you would expect, when opening the Chat tab you will be faced with all your current chats, by tabbing these it will then open to your instant messaging screen.

The IM screen is very well laid out and looks pretty much like the desktop version. It allows you to send photos and even has hundreds of smileys that you can send. A couple of neat little features that they have included are the ablilty to nudge a friend and the ability to see if they are typing back to you.

The last tab is Photos. This will allow you to upload new photos and put them in folders. This tab will allow you to create new folders for your pics and even let you decide who you share them with.

All in all this is a great first release from Microsoft and they seem to have the main things working well. The app implements push notifications so you don’t have to keep the app constantly open. There are however, a few things that Microsoft could add that would make this even better, first, group chat would be great and also the ability to create new groups to put your friends into.

Like I said this is a great release and for free I can’t really complain, Myself and Nazaroth have used it a little and we think that its good. So if you are a Live Messenger lover and can’t handle being away from you friends, well now you have no excuse.