AT&T have brought out a chat program called IM Anywhere, which allows you to organise multiple messaging services into one account.
Just like chat upstarts Eyeball Chat, Odigo, and Trillian, IM Anywhere lets you connect and chat with buddies on AOL, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger--provided you already have an account with those services. Unfortunately, unlike Trillian, AT&T snubs ICQ users. (According to the AT&T technician who hosts the IM Anywhere Support Forum, there are no immediate plans to add ICQ to the mix, but this person did say that ICQ support is on the company's to-do list.)
Even so, this IM makes easy work of managing three of the Big Four chat apps. Just download IM Anywhere, and if you don't already have a WorldNet account, walk through the quick registration steps (to sign up, you just need a unique username and password). To chat with your AOL, MSN, and Yahoo buddies, click the tiny icons (A = AIM, M = MSN, Y = Yahoo) at the very bottom of the main chat window and plug in your username and password for each account in the resulting window. (If you aren't registered with any of those services, you'll have to go to each service's Web site and create a new account.) You can choose to save your passwords so that IM Anywhere automatically logs you on to each service as soon as you load the client. Beyond interoperability, there's not much else here. Unlike Eyeball Chat and Yahoo Messenger, IM Anywhere doesn't do video chat. But you can choose to have your instant messages read to you, and in our preliminary tests, IM Anywhere accurately translated text to speech.
At press time, we had no problems chatting to our Yahoo and MSN buddies but could not connect to AOL. According to the technician who hosts the IM Anywhere Support Forum, AOL is attempting to block the service, in much the same way as they did with Trillian. Stay tuned for more news on this front as well as our full review.
Company: AT&T
Price: Shareware
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