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Comment by rufo | Hacker News Reader

Forgive me, for I know little in the ways of BlackBerrys, but: what's so great about BBM? Why is it so much better then SMS/Google Voice/IM with push/Facebook Chat that people go out of their way to purchase BlackBerry devices?

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There are three advantages to BBM that i love: (on blackberry devices, don't know how they'll be on other platforms

1) BBM is essentially a text message that is free. This is handy when you're oversees (business execs) for example. You can be in Taiwan and shoot a BBM to your partner in SF without having to worry about some ridiculous charge.

2) Read Notification - BBM will tell you when your message has been read or not (as opposed to text messages)

3) Group Chat - BBM does this really well - very easy to text and have conversations with multiple people.

4) BBM barcodes for contacts/groups

The "killer feature" of BBM tho' isn't any one thing, it's just that it's an incredibly polished, seamless experience, I have on my BB the Y!, MSN and Google clients and they are just clunky as hell compared to BBM. It's an absolute joy to use.

The barcode scanning is extremely flaky in my opinion, and in my experience will work on some devices and not on others.

Don't know much about BBM, but do know I constantly see friends on facebook passing around their BBM PIN. Assume it's some sort of unique ID, but that's not exactly efficient...

Your BBM PIN is separate from your phone number. My friends with Blackberrys have people they talk to on BBM that they don't even have phone numbers for.

You can be in Taiwan and shoot a BBM to your partner in SF without having to worry about some ridiculous charge.

BBM uses data, right? Wouldn't there be outrageous per kilobyte charges? Or does RIM have deals in place to get around that somehow?

Data on a BB is routed through RIMs servers. BB users generally aren't charged data if the track is intra-RIM.

It's also compressed and encrypted.

I think unexpected is referring to ridiculous charges just for sending a text message, yes data would still apply.

Not for BBM messages.

I've used BBM a lot overseas, but have never been charged an "international data" rate. So I would speculate that somehow it's avoided.

It's already included with their BlackBerrys, so the integration is seamless for everyone, tech-savvy or not. BlackBerry users just have to share their IDs, no installation required is a very nice feature. As you know, blackberry owners are not really big app installers [1]. As some guy would say : "It just works".

[1]: http://moconews.net/article/419-average-number-of-apps-downl...

Its a pretty fantastic chat tool. It provides message status (read/delivered), an easy way to transfer contacts, photos and videos right in the IM and it let's you create groups. Groups share all the aforementioned benefits as well as group chat, shared calendars, lists and photos.

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