You’re thinking ‘dammit, he’s talking about bbm again’, and you’re right – I am. Generally I only advocate things that I strongly believe in personally or professionally, and BBM is one of those things. This is my main method of communication for many reasons:
- security
- privacy
- file transfer
- money transfer
- voice and video chat
You may think your current method of chat is secure, and I say ignorance is bliss. A few of the features I like, besides the obvious, are:
Voice and Video – this week (04/27/2016) Blackberry introduced video chat to the Android platform of BBM. They said that the iOS upgrade would soon follow. Knowing Blackberry as I do, I’m sure it’s not that far away. I tried this out of course, and I am very impressed with the quality. I was in a v2v chat with and Android user, and a Blackberry user – and I could not tell the difference. With Blackberry emerging on the Android market with the incredible Priv, I’m sure we guessed BBM video wasn’t far behind.
Money Transfer – yes, whether you realized it or not, BBM is capable of transferring money with PayPal. There are no tricks or tweaks here, simply select a person, select the PayPal option, send money. The only consideration is both people have to have a current version of BBM that has the PayPal option. It also helps if you have a PayPal account.
Will requests private chat, Will 2 accepts or declines.
Privacy – the privacy in BBM is something very few know about. I don’t mean security and chats being leaked or exploited, what I do mean is private chat, timed messages and message recall. Private chat is something you initiate with another person, names and avatars are removed from the chat, the chat is deleted from both sides when the chat ends. This allows you to talk about confidential subjects, talk crap about somebody, or just want a conversation kept confidential with no names. Only one on one chats can utilize this feature – no names are displayed, and it would be really confusing with more than two people. Also, if the chat is left idle for 1 minute, the chat is ended and deleted from both sides. Another feature (?) of this private chat is – screenshots aren’t allowed! When the chat is gone, it is gone for good!
Timed message allow you to send a message or picture that can only be viewed for a certain amount of time. You select the timer feature, the amount of time you want the message to be viewed, and send the text or picture. After the selected time has expired, so has the message or attachment.
Message retract is as easy as it sounds. You’ve sent a message and you want to edit it, or wish you hadn’t sent it? Press and hold the message and you can retract it.
Pressing delete displays secondary menu
Of course all the other messaging features are included in BBM.
BBM Features
- voice/video chat
- private messaging
- timed messages
- retract message
- location using Glympse
- send/receive money with PayPal
- easily send files from Dropbox
Go grab BBM right now, and let your friends know how awesome it is!