For me, MSN has always served as a communication vector between me and important contacts. Mundu IM has made an excellent job of keeping me connected so far…so my excitement for Gizmo was pretty low. Can it make me a Gizmo freak?
When starting up Gizmo for the first time, it requires a so-called “Gizmo account”. A Gizmo account is an account that acts as a ‘wrapper’ around your other accounts - creating one is easy via the web interface:
Once the account is set up, you need to link the account with other services. This happens via a command line client available as a contact:
After that, contacts start to trickle in with weird characters mixed in for a stranger taste:
Whenever you message an MSN contact that’s offline, Gizmo mirrors the message at you. Since this is bundled with an Attention Manager notification(one per message!!!)…chaos will soon take over on your Treo’s screen:
Once a contact is online, the situation becomes drastically better - communication is possible without message duplication. However, user names are not shown:
Another very cool feature is the suppression of ‘emoticon crap’. The image below shows a few emoticons sent by a German MSN crapware…instead of rendering the HTML, the program just shows the smiley. Well done!
Most messaging programs for Palm OS have problems with keepalive or background mode. I am glad to say that Gizmo has neither - background mode just works, and connection losses are ‘covered up’!
This review looked at Gizmo v1.0b4 on a Treo 680 running on T-Mobile Austria’s GPRS network. The program needs approx 250k od RAM and can be downloaded from here.
Overall, Gizmo Project for Treo definitely still lacks the optical polish of its competitors. However, the freeware already makes a decent MSN communication tool - if you don’t already have Mundu, give it a whirl!
P.s. Tune in soon for a look at Gizmo’s voice features!
