Samsung has recently announced a new chat service called ChatOn that will have a very long list of smartphones and feature phones that it supports, including BlackBerry. While ChatOn will surely have a community of BlackBerry users, there’s simply too much deep integration that BBM provides over ChatOn for it to be any kind of replacement. Continue reading for more details.
Samsung’s ChatOn will have many of the same features of BBM including the ability to share images and files. One advantage that we’d like to see RIM implement is a web client that lets you use BBM on the desktop. If you’d like that functionality now, there is a third-party solution from Fixmo.
While the ChatOn service looks cool, and we’re sure it will have a great BlackBerry following, it will simply never replace BBM. Not only does BBM have deep integration with the platform that will always give it an advantage, there is also a large developer community supporting BBM that ChatOn will not have access to on BlackBerry. Samsung should have also announced a ChatOn Social Platform to share apps if it really wanted to be competitive.
Check out more details on ChatOn from the Samsung site.
