Samsung announces free Chaton app for Android

KOREAN HARDWARE GIANT Samsung has announced Chaton, an instant messaging service to take on Blackberry Messenger (BBM) and Imessage.

The app and service are available now for free via the Android Market or Samsung Apps. In a bid to rival BBM and Imessage, Chaton offers instant, er, chat between different smartphones.

Simon Stanford, head of mobile at Samsung said, "Samsung ChatON brings a communication service that encompasses multimedia, social media and instant messaging capabilities that will give our consumers yet another way to communicate and interact with our devices."

Features of the app include group chat, multimedia file sending and buddy interaction, which shows you who you chat with the most. The service can also be accessed via a web browser.

'Trunk' is an "innovative content storage feature [that] enables users to view all shared content from previous conversations in one easy-to-access window," according to Samsung.

The firm also said that Chaton will come pre-loaded on handsets with its Bada operating system starting this month. It will also be available for Blackberry and Iphone users soon. µ