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

Making international long distance calls on your iPhone just got a whole lot cheaper, courtesy of those clever cats over at Truphone. Interestingly, while this new iPhone app does use minute-stealing to connect calls at a cheaper rate to overseas destinations, it apparently does NOT steal minutes using VoIP or 3G on the iPhone itself. Instead, calls are routed to a local phone number operated by Truphone first, and once inside Truphone’s network, are routed to the international destination using Voice over IP.

Truphone users will be prompted, at the time they dial an international number, whether or not they’d like to use Truphone to handle the call. Very clever.

Tags: 3g, services, truphone, voip, wireless

Eighteen months ago, when the ’sphere was abuzz with posts about Joost, I downloaded it, blogged, played with for a few days, and then it more or less faded from my radar. I’m not as big on TV watching as many, and Joost lacked a lot of the social features that made YouTube and Hulu so effective for me.

But, while the YouTube experience on the iPhone is pretty cool, Joost offers one thing YouTube doesn’t: commercial content. So I installed Joost from the Appstore this morning. My expectation that it wouldn’t work on 3G was confirmed as soon as I fired it up. A quick trip to the Settings panel and my WiFi was re-enabled.

Within moments, I was watching Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in a 4-inch-screen version of Men in Black. It took about 20 seconds for the film to begin streaming. The quality was great and there were no burps during playback.

Tags: iphone, software, voip, wireless

If you’re like many iPhone users, you suck the power out of your battery completely about once every 24 hours. The more useful a thing is, the more you use it–hence, my iPhone’s battery tends to be more empty than full. Here’s what to do to keep that battery alive:

1. Disable 3G. Bar none, this is the single most effective way to increase battery life on the iPhone. If you can tolerate the slowness of Edge and you don’t use any realtime data apps (like VoIP stuff, say), then Edge should be sufficient. You’ll probably have fewer dropped calls with Edge too.

2. Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth. Unless you’re using them, WiFi and Bluetooth are battery killers. Besides, the gimpy-ness of the iPhone’s Bluetooth support makes me question why anybody would leave it on at all.

3. Decrease the frequency of e-mail checks. This will result in fewer data transmissions and preserve the battery.

4. Install the 2.2 firmware update. Apparently, it helps.

Tags: 2.2, 3g, battery, dropped calls, firmware, iphone, voip, wireless

Geo-centric functionality is more and more a necessity when building social devices, applications, and mashups. The relevance of location to almost every communications transaction is undeniable, and Palringo has embraced this truth by adding location identifiers to Palringo status messages, meaning that your buddy list will now display where in the world you are at the moment. Good stuff, even if it doesn’t warrant a full-length PR:

LONDON–Oct. 21, 2008—Palringo, one of the most popular instant messaging applications for mobile phones, has added live location information to the latest version of its application—Palringo Local.

Accurate to the suburb or even street level in a city, and to the closest named town in rural areas, Palringo users can opt to display their location alongside their status, for fun, personal, social, business or any other purpose.

Palringo Local goes live today for Microsoft® Windows Mobile® users, and will be delivered as an automatic update for existing users. Roll-out will follow for other popular mobile device operating systems—including Symbian OS™-based phones, Java™, BlackBerry® and iPhone™—completing before the end of 2008. Palringo Local for desktop/laptop editions of the Microsoft Windows® operating system also goes live from today and will be automatically updated.

Palringo enables vocal instant messaging and picture messaging, as well as text-based instant messaging. Knowing the location of contacts adds further richness to the experience and brings benefits in all sorts of scenarios. For example, it may help simply when meeting a friend, or in more sophisticated ways such as assessing whether a conversation will be cheaper to conduct via Palringo than by phone, if to call someone will clearly cause them to incur roaming charges. Palringo is extremely cost-effective to use.

Kerry Ritz, Palringo’s CEO, said: “Since the dawn of the mobile phone era, we’ve all listened into or been part of mobile phone conversations in which the two parties have asked each other where they are—or, with SMS, spent a message establishing those facts. Now, people won’t need to do that; provided someone wishes to ‘show,’ the basic instinct to ‘know,’ even if it doesn’t matter, is satisfied.

“But there are also quite practical reasons for showing your location: if you’re part of a group all meeting in one place, like a sports team; or you want to know where your delivery drivers are without investing in expensive systems. Whatever your reason to show your location, now you can,” he explained.

Anyone using Palringo Local must specifically opt in to display their location; users can opt in and out at will. Even opted in, users retain control over which contacts can see their location. Location may also be set manually.

The popular instant messaging services with which Palringo integrates are: AOL® Instant Messenger®, Google Talk™, Yahoo!® Messenger®, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ®, Jabber® and Windows Live. People can also use Palringo to contact their friends using iChat®, Apple’s IM application.

Palringo is free to download from www.palringo.com. There are no subscriptions or other hidden charges.

Tags: gps, software, voip