Today it was announced that IM+ by ShapeServices has been submitted to the Marketplace. Assuming all is well, that means you folks should have it in your hands sometime this weekend or early next week.
But hey, why wait that long? Instead, take a gander at our video tour of the new, near universal instant messaging app that supports AIM, Facebook, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MySpace, Skype and Yahoo! The one omission is MSN, which is evidently due to a Microsoft mandate (more on that later). No biggy though, as we'll have full integration with MSN and the OS in Mango this fall.
So how's the app? Well, we couldn't get the push notifications/live tile to work, but we think that's just a temporary server issue. Point is, those features are there and should work by launch. The app design is very minimalist, which is great--it almost feels sparse, but then you remember all that it can do. Load times were decent--once again, it's a v1.0 app, so we expect performance improvements in later releases.
Overall, pretty solid start and we like what we see. Should be interesting to see how it all works out upon release.
