A new service by the name of ChatOn is being launched by Samsung which offers a cross-platform chat service on their mobile phones. The launch will take place sometime in the upcoming weeks as Samsung hopes to attract more users to their smartphones as the company puts up its challenge against the competition in the mobile messaging services market.
It is expected that ChatOn will support a number of different mobile platforms, which include Google’s Android and Samsung’s very own Bada operating system along with some feature phones and also a couple of platforms from Samsung’s rivals like Apple’s iOS and RIM’s BlackBerry OS. It has been reported that the service, which is similar to RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger in sharing documents, photos, contacts, voice messages and videos, will allow the users to chat one on one with their contacts and also hold group chat sessions.
Those who use the service will be able to comment on the profiles of their contacts, much like Facebook, send each other multimedia messages which are a combination of audio and text and access their Interaction Rank which is a measure of their activeness on the ChatOn network. It is rumored that the users of feature phones will be able to share images, calendar entries, contacts and send text messages using the service.
This announcement from Samsung comes at a crucial time as more and more smartphone users are shunning the more expensive carrier text messaging services and turning to the communication features provided by the large number of apps available on the different mobile operating systems.
A major research analysis firm published a report last week which said that text messages may be completely deserted in the next three or four years, which makes the instant messaging applications available for smartphones and tablets very important in the present context.
One of the most prominent examples of this is the BlackBerry Messenger app, which has become quite a prominent and indispensable tool for BlackBerry users. BBM is a fixed rate text messaging alternative which is quite handy even in times of high communication traffic, such as during natural calamities since it uses the internet.
Apple, too, is launching a similar service called the iMessage which is expected to come out by this fall. It will provide instant and free communication between iOS devices such as the iPhones and the iPad, which will run via Wi-Fi and 3G data services rather than rely on cellular texts.
