I was able to try Mantra Group’s Causerie Premier Edition , an IM Client for Palm, this last week thanks to Kevin Doel. I have accounts on all the major IM platforms: AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ & GoogleTalk, which is of course a Jabber implementation. I do not use ICQ that often so did not review that platform. On the remaining platforms, I was especially impressed with how seamless everything just worked once your accounts were set up. The Premier Edition supports two different accounts on the same IM service as well as bot support from a variety of Mantra Group bots ranging from weather, stock quotes, directions, CA traffic, news and more. I had a problem where my zip code did not seem to be recognized for a few of the bots which is weird since I am in a large Metropolitan area but since I am not a big bot user I was not that annoyed.
Mantra Group also has IM products for the non-Palm OS individuals with clients for the Blackberry, Pocket PC, J2ME, Brew & Symbian devices.
I was easily able to keep up with friends while away from my computer thanks to the ability to run Causerie in the background. I would login to whichever services I wanted to be active in and then just switch to whatever else I wanted to do. Causerie would continue to run and alert me if I had new messages to check. It definitely does what it is supposed to well.
My one small pet peeve with the product was that as soon as I set it up to run in the background, my SnapperMail’s “Turn off LED” setting was immediately disregarded. Not a big issue or deal breaker but something one should keep in mind while using it.
The final thing to consider is pricing. Keep in mind that Causerie is a per year subscription not a one- time fee as some other clients may be. However, Causerie does allow the two logins to the same service and thus you have a trade off. It is up to the individual to decide which is more important. Personally, I usually prefer to pay for my software and move on so that was a slight sticking point with me. I can say that it works well as an IM client and it did not crash my Treo. Decide for yourself with a free trial.
