Samsung's ChatON message app to play nice with iOS, BBM, Android, Bada

Samsung's ChatON is the newest addition to the growing group messaging space. The application, which is drawing comparisons to RIM's BlackBerry Messenger, will launch next month in 62 languages and more than 120 countries, allowing conversations across mobile platforms including Samsung's Bada, iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

ChatON will feature a Web-based client for PC users wanting to chat one-on-one or in group conversations, and feature-phone owners can use the app to text and share images and contact information. But it's smartphone users that are Samsung's main target, with ChatON offering the ability to share multimedia, location and calendar information in group chats, and create and send animated messages. (Kind of silly, that latter feature, but who knows -- with girls sending more messages than anyone, heart-filled animations could wind up bumping up the megabytes crossing the wires.)

A feature called Trunk lets users in a chat room see all sent images and videos in a glance and comment on each, and —taking a page of sorts from the Foursquare playbook — an Interaction Rank shows a user's most active friends.

As social-networking adoption slows down among the youth segment, apps that allow interactions between more intimate user groups seem to be picking up steam. Facebook, buying Beluga, recently introduced a Messenger feature that lets iOS and Android users chat with Facebook friends; Skype recently acquired GroupMe; and Google+, with its "circles" of contacts, passed 25 million users within weeks of its launch. But given Samsung's ability to install ChatMe on the tens of millions of smartphones and tablets it ships each quarter, the truer comparisons are to BBM — which RIM is also using to launch a music service (CP: RIM BBM Music may give music fans more to savor) — and iMessage, which Apple is expected to introduce this fall with iOS 5.

Ted Livingston, CEO of messaging app Kik, offered Connected Planet some insight, in a recent email, that may foretell the luck Samsung will have with the PC component of ChatON.

"Facebook and Skype rely on people turning on their computers, connecting to the Internet, and logging into their services," said Livingston, "while in the 'new world' [i.e., Beluga, GroupMe, Kik], phones are always on, always connected and always logged in. ... Adding people to your contacts lists in a texting service that may not be online to receive these texts ... is not a solution that will work moving forward."