Palringo already lets you voice and IM on a plethora of networks–and on just about every platform we care about, including the iPhone.   But today we received word that Palringo is adding location awareness features, including distances and maps (a la Loopt?) to its iPhone version in the next release, due “soon”.  Excellent.  Here’s the announcement from Palringo:

iPhone users looking for their nearest friends need only to glance at their screens, thanks to the addition today of location functionality to Palringo’s popular rich-messaging application.

From today, users looking down their contact lists see not only the location of their Palringo contacts—typically a town name—but also how far away those contacts are from them.

In the next update (due soon), a further click will bring up a map showing the location of a contact and also the location of any other Palringo contacts within a 10km/6-mile radius.

In the same update, the location function will allow a user to display his own location on a map—highly convenient for a user visiting somewhere for the first time.

Location and proximity information adds an interesting new layer of social network connectivity. A Palringo user can choose to reveal her location to any, all or none of her contacts, changing this selection at any time. Location can be set manually by the user, or Palringo can detect location automatically, keeping it continuously updated.

More screengrabs after the jump.

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Tags: aim, gps, icq, im, instant message, location, palringo, voip, yahoo

Palringo will introduce tomorrow morning a new feature for their fabulous iPhone communications app.  The new feature, known as vocal IM or push-to-talk (PTT) gives iPhone users the ability to have walk-talky like functionality, a trademark of the earliest digital handsets like those offered by Nextel in the 90’s.  With Palringo, the Apple phone finally has desktop-style IM, instant voice messaging, and VoIP calling, all in a single compact application. Expect the official announcement on Tuesday, July 19.

Palringo’s software also supports Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices (Nokia).  The best part — Palringo is a free download from the App Store. So grab it tomorrow.

Tags: appstore, iphone, palringo, push-to-talk, software, voip