Saurav's Blog

If you don’t know, Ovi Chat is the official chat client from Nokia supporting multiple chat networks such as Google talk, Yahoo, Windows Live etc.   

Currently, it is not officially available for Nokia N8 It is now available officially for Nokia N8 and other phones running Symbian^3.

It is good that Nokia is taking time to fix the bugs and optimize it. Currently, I found the following problems with this in my N8   

• No Facebook chat. Although there are other apps available for this but Nokia included MySpace chat which is a dead service instead of Facebook for some reason beyond my understanding.
• Runs a little bit slow because it is based on Widget runtime. An app based on Qt/QML would have been better, but I can understand that Nokia opted for WRT for maintaining compatibility with older phones.   
• The whole interface is two tap based and not single tap which fits more to Symbian^3’s UI. Single tap UI in Ovi Chat 3.1 on Symbian^3 phones.

When launched for the first time it will install a home Screen widget from where you can directly change your status or read any latest chat message to you.

Once the app is running, you can either close it from the task manager or select to hide in the menu. This way, the app will eat less resources and still be running in the background till someone sends you an IM.

Here are some screenshots…

Here is a chat I was having with my surprised friend Yash (@alsiladka) when I told him about this.

The good thing about Ovi Chat is that it also integrates with the phonebook. You can link any contact on say, Google Talk to anyone in your phone book, Then, you can call that person from within the app.

Once running, it also shows those contact who are linked and are online from within your Phone Book. So your phonebook becomes one place for contacting anyone by all means possible, whether it is Chat, SMS, Phone/Video call, Facebook or Twitter. 

This is how new message notification shows when the app is hidden in the background.

On Symbian^3, the app supports right click context menus which open when you long press on a contact or running conversation.

Overall, other then the speed issue and lack of Portrait and Split screen Qwerty in N8, this chat app is very good and does all the basic tasks. Officially, it is available at the Ovi Store.