Palm® Pre™ for Dummies®

Chapter 6. Staying in Touch with Instant Messaging

In This Chapter

• Adding your instant messaging (IM) accounts to your Pre

• Starting and managing IM conversations

• Getting notified when someone IMs you

Long gone are the days when staying connected simply meant having a cellphone with you at all times that you could use to make and receive calls. Nowadays, you're probably inundated with text messages, multimedia messages, and everything in between. And it's not enough to just check your e-mail or your IMs when you come back to your computer, either — people expect you to be on top of that, too — and reply. How the heck are you supposed to manage all this from a phone?

For starters, Pre supports the most popular IM services, which makes it easy to stay connected to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Google Talk, and others when you're away from your desk. And to help you keep your sanity while you get blasted with all those IMs, Synergy technology from Palm saves the day by helping you keep everything organized in one place. You don't need to hop between several different accounts, programs, and devices to see everything being said to you.

In principle, text messages, multimedia messages, and IMs are quite similar: With all these technologies, the idea is that you're exchanging very short messages with others in real time. The Pre OS — webOS — capitalizes on that similarity by grouping all these types of messages into a single place, ordered chronologically into a thread. Whether you're sending ...