Instant Messaging on the Mobile

An interesting thing about the mobile, is that communities are getting formed, which do not have a precedent on the Internet. AOL, Yahoo, MSN all have their internet communities, of which a subset of this are now communicating via mobile (mostly on SMS).

Jataayu's Instant Messaging Community is one such community, where friends who have mobiles can log onto this community and communicate, without actually downloading a client.
That's because a lot of today's mobiles such as the Moto Razr V3, SE's T630 etc. all come with an IM client pre-installed.

You might ask why we would need IM on the mobile, when we already have SMS and MMS.
When trying this community out, I found that since these clients work purely through GPRS, they work out much cheaper than MMS and SMS.
Hence, when on roaming, even though I am charged higher rates for SMS, the rate which I am charged for IM, is the same data rate which I was paying when I was not on roaming.

hmmmmmmmmm....

What are the problems, you may ask? Well, for one, my battery gets drained out real quickly,
reducing my single charge time from 2 days to 1 day :(