Ping! vs Whatsapp

Ping! changed up the SMS game very quickly when it offered iPhone to iPhone and iPod Touch instant messaging over the 3G or WiFi networks via Push Notification from Apple. But there is a new player in town, Silicon Vallery based Whatsapp that is invading the Ping! territory.

Ping! comes in two flavours, the free and cheap version. I bought the $0.99 app just because I wanted the full featured application. Ping’s user interface is pretty straightforward, click on a person, send them a message and you are done. You do have to create a Ping! account and have to know the name of other users to contact them, kinda like an IM client like iChat or MSN, you have to know the persons handle, so its not that unfamilar. I know a relatively small network of people using Ping but one of them is my wife on her iPod Touch, and she sends me hate IM’s through it all the time, so it’s great, at least for her. The very fact that you can actually communicate from simply two internet connected devices is actually pretty cool. You can connect the users in Ping with your contacts as well, so that makes it easy to find phone numbers etc of the people you are chatting with.

Some of the complaints I hear with Ping, albeit I have not experienced them myself, is that the Push Notifications don’t always work and messages are not sent. Now that could be in part due to the user not turning Push on from the settings panel, possibly not turning them on in the the app itself. Its always worked for me so its all good.

So what is all the hype with Whatsapp. Well, the first thing is that you don’t really need to create a user account at all to use it. Whatsapp uses your phone number to create a profile for you, now for some this is good for others they like the anonymity, for me it’s one less thing to do so I like it. The major bummer with Whatsapp is that since it relies on a phone number it does not support iPod Touch users, this is a huge deal for the millions of kids out there that are avid texters that cant communicate using Whatsapp, in this area Ping is the only one. So my wife cant harass me using Whatsapp, great for me this time.

Technology wise, Whatsapp uses push notification as well, so it’s not much different from Ping there. User interface wise, it integrates nicely with their version of the contacts that shows you who in your contact list is already using Whatsapp. And that is actually really cool.

Now here is the game changer when it come to a mobile IM client. Rumour has it that Whatsapp is going to be the company to have iPhone to BlackBerry messaging. Cross platform IM, that’s a real game changer and when it happens, I won’t have to hear Mike Yokota whine about his need for this BlackBerry because of BBIM.