A MAJOR breakthrough in the provisioning of Instant Messaging (IM) services for mobile phones is being claimed by Israeli software house, Tjat. The best news is that it is totally clientless.

Generally speaking in order to get to the popular IM systems – such as ICQ, MSN and Yahoo – you either have to have the client pre-loaded onto the handset or download a Java application.

With Tjat's offering, all you need is a WAP browser and a data connexion. The company has also just signed its first major deal – with Vodafone Czech.

For this particular implementation, it is supporting just four different IM services – MSN, ICQ, Yahoo and Chikka. In theory others can be added such as Aim and Googletalk.

We tried it out with MSN/Windows Live Messaging and it not only works perfectly, but it is very easy to use.

Tjat's Gideon Drori told the INQ that IM is just the beginning. The range of possibilities will first be extended to email – so you can access any POP3 mailbox from your mobile phone.

Guess what comes after that? Yup. You'll soon be able to upload pictures from you cameraphone and transfer them to social networks such as Facebook. How so very trendy.

Drori also mention a fairly unique feature about Tjat's implementation of IM. It's multi-lingual. So if you access the company from a German network – for example, it will kick off in German. But you can then change the whole UI over to Turkish, if you want.

As Drori says, "Java apps are great as long as you want to write them in English." With Tjat's clientless solution you get far more flexibility than an alternative Java-based implementation.

To try it for yourself, just point your WAP browser to http://wap.tjat.com. µ

L'INQ
Tjat