Ben's Blog World: Windows Live Messenger for iPhone hits the App Store

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Windows Live Messenger for iPhone hits the App Store

Filed under: Microsoft, Social Software, iPhone

Call me crazy, but there's something awesome about 1) an official app from Microsoft 2) with Windows branding appearing in Apple's App Store. Today, Live Messenger for the iPhone became available for download on your iPhone or iPod touch. And like the Bing app which came before it, Live Messenger for the iPhone is actually quite good.

Launch the app, and you'll see your Live social stream -- which is also quite cool, but unfortunately most of my friends don't use Live a heck of a lot so my feed ends up looking more like "So what's Long Zheng up to today?" (If you're reading, the launch photos were excellent)...

Pick a friend, start chatting. All your currently active chats are placed on the chat screen for easy bouncing back-and-forth between conversations. Live Messenger also allows you to upload pictures from your iPhone -- and apply one of 36(!) photo effects. While I don't think I'll be using the hearts-and-kisses frame too often, the auto-adjust and warm/cool variations are quite useful.

Check out the new app on the iTunes website, or hit up the App Store on your device and give it a whirl. I'm impressed so far -- I just wish it had multi-protocol chat support, but that's probably akin to asking them for EXT2/3/4 support in Windows. Sigh.

One more thing -- I wonder if Apple will finally force wannabe-apps to do something about their icons and names. There's some pretty infringe-y stuff impersonating Live Messenger in the App Store right now.