Last night, Reggie (the administrator here at Internet Tablet Talk) IMed me and our conversation fell into a discussion about GAIM on the Nokia 770. Me, I don’t use it because Reggie turns out to be the only person outside the technology group at work whom I communicate with using IM.

So he was educating me, and as a test, he logged out of his Mac-based IM and back in on GAIM on the 770. We were using MSN Messenger (work choice) and at my end everything was indistinguishable from PC- and Mac-based IM. My thought was that IM can’t be too useful if you’re not online with the 770 a lot, and we got around to wondering how GAIM and Opera get along together, given Opera’s demands on the CPU and memory.

Our little test consisted of opening GAIM, connecting in two conversations (Reggie with his brother overseas, too) and then opening the web browser ot the itT home page. First, we found that messages I sent to him didn’t alert him in any way while he was in the browser. He did see them when he switched applications manually, though. Then his system froze when he opened a second web browser (or maybe he was able to open an empty window and it was when he entered a web address — have to get him to clarify).

I’ll encourage Reggie to write this up more systematically. I learned that GAIM works with a variety of IM services (yes, like most people I have one of each) and that multiple conversations show up in tabs — something I wish the browser did too. I hope that somehow an alert capability can get devised (something blinking? something audible?), and the browser issue worked out too.

BTW, Reggie was IMing because he’s traveling to New York today, and will meet the Nokia folk responsible for the 770 at a function tomorrow evening. It’ll be nice for him to put faces to names — I won’t be at this face-to-face because I’m traveling out of New York tomorrow. For that matter, it would be nice for me to put a face to Reggie’s name — although I’ve gotten to know him and Mike Cane and many others working with the 770, I’ve never met any of them.

Reggie told me he was going to try and report live on the event tomorrow night, so look for information on how to keep track of things here or on the itT front page. And if you have questions, do send them to him — he’ll be posting a way to reach him beforehand.