I love my iPhone. I love it as a remote for my TV, as my go to source for news content, as my iPod, as my gaming device: but it doesn’t have BBM. One feature is not a deal breaker when it comes to smartphones but the potential to have massive group conversations is an extremely social and intriguing concept (so much potential that some people carry around a blackberry….and another smartphone *cough*miz*cough*). If only there was a chat program that worked cross platform. A way that not just blackberries, but all smart phones could communicate. That’s where PingChat comes in.

Finding an app that could achieve this cross platform functionality was kind of a mini obsession during the summer. I tried lots of chat programs from the iTunes App store, and many were solid pieces of programing, but they all suffered a similar problem:  they were exclusive to iOS (the mobile operating system that the iPhone and iPad has installed on it). PingChat solves this problem. Not only does it work with Android OS (think the Droid, Sprint’s Epic 4G, etc.), but it also came out with a blackberry client very recently.

What does this mean for me?

Remember when you and your friends were at that party and everyone with a blackberry had a group BBM going the entire night? Kinda felt annoyed to be left out of the conversation right? This program has the potential to remove that annoyance.

I want to make it very clear that I do not in any way believe it will kill BBM or even dent its usage: blackberry has huge marketing campaigns about their chat features and it has been around for far too long to simply be extinguished by a random app from a small company. However, if word of mouth can cause more people to start “pinging”, we could see a real rise in the value of this app. It crashes somewhat frequently, adding friends is a bit of a hassle, and it will most likely have problems associated with the new blackberry version because it was JUST released, but I urge you to give it a shot. The more people with it, the more useful it becomes.

Happy Pinging.

http://pingchat.com/