Every now and then an app comes along which revolutionises the uses for your iPhone. Angry Birds is one of them, so simple yet highly addictive and now a multi-million times downloaded phenomenom. Another, you could say, would be the Google app, or the included Maps app, or Facebook (maybe not). LiveProfile is certainly not one of these apps, but its bloody good.
For years the Smartphone war has been between Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry. One of the Blackberry’s redeeming functions was Blackberry Messanger (BBM) which allowed you to send a message, free of charge, to other people on Blackberry. The catch was you could only do this between Blackberry’s, which left iPhone owners, and now Android owners, out in the cold. Many for iPhone did the same thing but never really caught on. WhatsApp, Ping to name a few offered a similar service, but iPhone users never took to the idea. This is where LiveProfile is different. It is the first istant messanger of its kind to be available on iPhone, Blackberry and Android. This obviously eliminates the issue of only being able to contact people with the same type of smartphone. Hazzarr!
All you need to do is download the App, create your profile and then give people your ‘Pin’ which is an automatically created series of letters and numbers. This acts kind of like your phone number, in which it allows people to contact you. The App gives you the opportunity to email people your PIN, post it to Facebook or Twitter and even send an SMS to contacts in your phonebook. Once people add you (or you add them) you can chat away.You can even add a picture and change the status of your profile for all to see.
Everything sounds rosy yes? Well its not. I don’t know if the creaters of LiveProfile are eternal pessimists, but they were certainly not ready for the speed LiveProfile took off. Performance soon went downhill and inbetween messages not being delivered and downloading constant updates, LiveProfile lost a bit of its edge. Performance now is a lot better, but its still taken a bit of the shine off what was looking like a top notch app.
So all in all I’ll give the app 3/5 due to the performance problems that seem to be effecting it. But don’t get me wrong, this is definitely a step up from the others available out there and very much worth a download.