It seems that there’s still room for another cross-platform messaging app as Samsung unveils ChatON. If RIM has BlackBerry Messaging and Apple has iMessage for its iOS 5 devices, Samsung will have its own messaging app called ChatON.
ChatON is Samsung’s global mobile communication service that works across all major smartphone and feature phone platforms using the internet. No need to pay if you wish to send a text message or an image or a video to a buddy in another part of the globe. It even supports group chat mind you.
Most cross-platform messaging app like Kik or WhatsApp can be used by Android, BlackBerry and iPhone. All are smartphones. With ChatON, even Samsung feature phones can join in the fun. Just like WhatsApp, ChatOn will also be made available to other mobile platform giving it a very, very wide reach. An added benefit of ChatON is that there’s also a web client so that those using PCs or laptops can also join in the conversation or send photos or videos to other ChatON enabled phones.
Check out this video demo of ChatON to better understand it:
So will this solution take off considering there are already a lot of established over-the-net messaging apps available? There’s a big possibility but we still have to see how the setup looks like. We don’t want to be registering another username and password like Skype, Yahoo! and Facebook and creating another set of contact list just for ChatON. BBM uses a unique BlackBerry PIN for identification. WhatsApp uses your mobile phone number and will automatically pull other WhatsApp users from your contact list based on their number. I hope ChatON will be similar.
[Samsung]
