All in one instant messenger
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Homepage : http://www.trillian.cc/
Today I will be doing the review of Trillian Basic & Pro 3.1. The difference between Trillian Basic & Pro is that Basic is free whereas Pro version is paid. I've called it All in one instant messenger because it incorporates four biggest messaging softwares, which are AIM (AOL INSTANT MESSENGER), Yahoo!, MSN & ICQ. It allows users to login to these services with one interface and original softwares are not required for this. Now, I'll write the review of the software :
Installlation : The software is of around 9 MB and once downloaded the installation is really simple. Anyway, these days the installation of software is fairly simple...you just have to click on next button and finally on the finish button :)
Interface : Trillian has got a nice interface and after the installation it asks the user to put in the information about their IM's so that it can integrate the services. Once launched it allows users to put themselves in away mode, available mode or invisible mode and all this with just 1 or 2 click. As I mentioned that interface is nice but it can be a bit confusing for the newbies...but once they get used to it..then it becomes fairly simple to use.
Ease of use : Trillian is fairly simple to use for those who are bit knowledgable in the field of computers but it can be a bit difficult for those who are still new. However, the list management is extremely simple and is easy to understand as there are seprate icons for seprate IM services.
Features : Trillian has got good amount of features in it. Most importantly, multi-IM feature and apart from that it also supports Voice and Video which are not available in rest of the multi-IM softwares. It needs quick time to support the webcam feature. It has got the smiley support and it supports it differntly for different service, so it becomes familiar for the users too. Another advantage of the Trillain is that it supports plugins and skins..so users can customize it in the way they want!
Difference in Basic & Pro : Well, Trillain basic is a freeware however Trillian Pro is a paid software. The major difference between the two is that PRO supports JABBER while Basic is not able to support that. Also, Pro has multi-user support while Basic just supports one user. Pro has got some small modifications..which are almost negligible and most of the users wont even use them but it is the Jabber and multi-user support only which makes it PRO from Basic :). Users can purchase the PRO version at the cost of $25 and with this they get 1 year of free upgrade.
Rating : 4 Dinos out of 5
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1 Comments:
commented by sandbox, 2:34 AM
If you want to use GoogleTalk with Trillian then you have to upgrade to Pro because GTalk uses the Jabber network, which as you said is not supported in Basic.
Also, when I evaluated this I had trouble getting the IRC interface to work through a proxy.
I use GAIM for these reasons -- GTalk compatibility and connecting to IRC through proxy works fine. The only benefit for me with Trillian was the multi-user features, but if they've gotten rid of that then you would only use it because it's so much prettier than GAIM.