Cingular customers can now stay connected with the Yahoo! Messenger community through their phones.
Cingular Wireless customers can now access their Yahoo! Messenger accounts and send/receive instant messages on their wireless phones through a full-color, graphical interface called Mobile Instant Messaging.
Cingular Wireless, the second largest wireless carrier in the U.S., and Yahoo!, a leading global Internet company, today announced the launch of Cingular’s Mobile Instant Messaging application using Yahoo! Messenger.
The new application will allow Cingular customers to easily use their wireless phones to manage their friends list, check the availability of friends and family online, and send/receive instant messages with anyone in the Yahoo! Messenger community.
“Cingular is pleased to provide our customers the chance to stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues virtually anywhere by accessing Yahoo! Messenger from their Cingular Wireless phone,” said Jim Ryan, vice president, data product management and business marketing, Cingular Wireless. “Instant messaging has exploded in the U.S., and this gives our 25 million customers even more messaging options.”
“We are excited to continue to expand our successful relationship with Cingular and extend Yahoo!’s leading services beyond the desktop,” said Doug Garland, senior vice president, broadband and mobile services, Yahoo! Inc. “Yahoo! Messenger has become an essential part of consumers’ lives and consumers can now take an enhanced version of Yahoo! Messenger with them while on the go.”
Today’s announcement is another example of how Cingular Wireless and Yahoo! continue to bring innovative messaging products to the wireless community. In May 2003, the companies announced the launch of PC-to-Mobile IM, which enabled Cingular Wireless customers to have two-way conversations with PC users using text messaging. Yahoo! also recently launched an extensive suite of information applications through Cingular’s MEdia Net service, including e-mail, mapping, games, news, and weather. Today’s announcement enhances the instant messaging experience for consumers by extending the messaging capabilities of the Yahoo! Messenger service from customers’ PCs to their wireless phones.
Cingular Wireless selected Comverse’s next-generation Mobile Instant Messaging solution to power this new service, as it gives the user the ability to connect to their friends and family anytime, from virtually anywhere. Users now have access to existing desktop Instant Messaging services from the convenience of their phones, greatly enhancing the fun that can be had with a mobile phone.
Availability
To access Yahoo! Messenger, customers can download the Cingular Mobile IM application — in the IM and Chat section of Cingular’s MEdia Net — to their wireless phones. The application is currently available for the Motorola V400 and V600 phones, and will be available on additional handsets soon.
Pricing
There is no charge for the Cingular Mobile IM application except for transport charges during the download process. Cingular customers pay $0.10 each time they send and receive a mobile instant message, or they can sign up for a Text/Instant Messaging package, where messages can be sent and received for as little as $0.02 each. Cingular customers are never charged airtime or kilobytes for logging into the IM application on their phone to send/receive messages.
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