There are so many different messaging apps available now that allow you to do all sorts of different things, each vying for your attention in an ever-growing and increasingly competitive market. U&Me Messenger, available for Android through the Google Play store, is the latest addition to the genre.
The app itself is well designed, and offers up some decent features to grab your attention. The first is the Facetime-style HD video calls, which worked well in my experience and are completely free, and complement the (also free) audio calls well.
The best thing about the app, however, is the deep social integration alongside easy access to popular services. For example, you can grab a YouTube video and send it to a friend, all within the confines of the app. There is even a built-in Google image search, which is actually a surprisingly powerful tool when chatting about any particular subject.
Here, straight from the developer, are the app’s best features:
Free Text messages Messages are free and don’t use your SMS plan
Social Sharing (Facebook / Twitter) – Images/ pictures/ audio/ video and status, share everything across social media accounts
Group Chat- Create group & add as many as 1000 people to share relevant information
Attachments- Send files up to 1 GB
Gallery- Share 15 images at a time; get new look to your attachments with ‘Image Filters’
Audio- FREE high quality audio calls
Video- HD video calls for FREE
Documents- Send documents/ files of any format Pdf, PPT, Excel, Word and soon
Google Image- In-built Google search option allowing you to attach & share unlimited images at one go
YouTube- Inbuilt in U&Me and can attach unlimited video’s using U&Me Chap app
Around Me- Find friends/ updates around, filter search results & develop your network
Events- Participate/ conduct events, rate it/ collect results easily.
The app makes it as easy as possible to extend your networking within the framework of the app, by adding social network and phone contacts, and even allowing you to find nearby users of the app. You can create events, which is something that not a lot of its competitors allows users to do, which really helps in keeping organised and timely when it comes to arranging things with friends.
The ability to send documents is a real plus, as is the functionality allowing you to send 15 picture galleries to friends with custom filters added to the images. The only problem I had with the app was that it could be a little unstable with logins, but this only happened a couple of times.
Overall, this is a well designed and impressive chat offering that does just about everything you could want from a chat service on Android.
