Home-> Nokia N810->Instant Messaging

(DGH) updated Wed Aug 20 14:11:34 2008

The bundled instant messaging application RTComm (called "Chat" in the menu) as delivered supports Google Talk and Jabber, but not other commonly-used services such as ICQ or AIM. If you require support for the latter two, there are (at least) two different options. My personal favorite is to install a couple extra plugins that add support to the bundled chat application. An alternative is to install a second chat application called Pidgin to deal with AIM and ICQ.

Note that you cannot do both (at least not without some hackery); due to some shared files, the installation process will fail.

Adding Support to the Bundled App

  1. On your N810, browse to the Gronmayer Meta-Repository. Find the Collabora Haze repository and click the install arrow to add it to the repository list in the application manager. (Yes, it says it is for Chinook not Diablo. It will still work, until there is a version built for Diablo specifically.)
  2. Using the Application manager, install the account-plugin-haze and telepathy-haze packages.
  3. You should now be able to add new accounts (from the Chat application menu Tools->Accounts... command) for AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo.
  4. If you don't like all the bells and flashing LEDs and blinking notifier icons every single time there is a new chat message, go to the Chat application menu, select Tools->Settings... then choose the Alerts tab and uncheck the things you don't want.

Installing Pidgin

  1. On your N810, browse to the Gronmayer Meta-Repository. Find the Pidgin on Maemo repository and click the install arrow to add it to the repository list in the application manager. (Yes, it says it is for Chinook not Diablo. It will still work, until there is a version built for Diablo specifically.)
  2. In the Application manager, Pidgin should now appear in the list of installable applications. Install it. Also install the pidgin-protocol-aim-icq package, which provides plugins for the AIM and ICQ protocols.
  3. In the Pidgin menu, choose Tools->Preferences and set Show system tray icon to Never. (They're talking about the panel icon; the N810 doesn't have a "System Tray".) I suggest disabling this, because I found it would make the Hildon desktop disappear when I tapped it.