Admit it, you’re as connected as they come. You juggle five different IM accounts, and Facebook is never more than a tap away. If you are this brand of ultimate social butterfly, Agilemobile has just the app for you: Agile Messenger HD Pro.
On a basic level, Agile Messenger is the IM app to beat. With a clean, customizable UI and a diverse feature set, this app allows you to manage all your instant messaging accounts in a single, unified location, while also adding some useful extra features.
Adding an account to your contact list is a simple matter of tapping a button in the top of the screen that looks like a squat, armless person, and selecting from an expansive list of services, which include ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Jabber, Google, and Facebook. In Agile Messenger HD Lite, the free version of the app, Facebook messaging access comes with no cost, and other services can be purchased a la carte for $.99 each, or you can buy the pro version of the software for $2.99 and get all of them at once.
Juggle your accounts and your status for each of them with ease.
Once you have added an account to your list, your contacts appear in a sidebar, complete with their availability status, profile pictures, e-mail addresses, and additional contact information. When new contacts come online, Agile highlights the person’s name. Additionally, the app supports push notifications, so you never have to miss a chat again.
In addition to these standard messaging features, Agile offers some great extras. One of our favorite bits of functionality was the ability to send multimedia messages in our IM conversations. By starting a conversation and tapping the picture button, you can send images stored on your iPad to your friends. They will receive an IM containing a link to view the file externally. Additionally, you can record voice messages by tapping the microphone button. In our experience, these features worked well and as expected. When we initially started playing with the service, we had one picture message get delayed, but that was the only hiccup.
Also, if friends send you web links, you can view them without having to app-swap by using Agile’s native browser. While we found that the in-app web experience was stripped-down and often a bit on the slow side, it was sufficient for checking out a picture on the fly or quickly scanning an article sent to us by a buddy.
There's plenty of visual customization, and the app works in both landscape and portrait modes.
To sweeten the pot, Facebook integration is also spot-on, and you have the ability to view your notifications or a friend’s feed by tapping the info button next to his or her name.
Finally, Agile provides you with a host of options for further customization of your experience. Everything from the SMS-like use of speech bubbles, to chat history management and time-stamping can be tweaked at will. We noticed slight, occasional menu delays when navigating some of the options, but, for the most part, the experience was a flawless one.
Rather than pushing out an up-scaled version of the previously existing iPhone client, Agilemobile has created the ultimate iPad IM app: one that makes expert use of screen real estate and is both comfortable to use and intuitive to navigate. So, go ahead. Take control of your online social life. If you are an IM addict, you should not hesitate to pick this app up.
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