Yahoo Messenger 7 Beta Reviewed

Yahoo started offering preview of its new messenger Yahoo Messenger 7 this wednesday. As most of my friends call it Yahell instead of YIM, I was really curious to experience the new offerings .. So here it goes ..

Whats new in YIM 7 :

•    Apart from a few cosmetic changes, YIM’s newest feature is PC to PC calls .. Now YIM users can make direct pc to pc calls free over the net .. This move is due to increasing userbase of Skype and Hello! services which Yahoo! thinks it can attract .. The quality of voice mail was good indeed on my dialup line ..
  
• The looks are changed a bit too .. Now the messenger shows a pop up description of contacts and most tasks are available in the pop up …
  

• There is a nice integration with Yahoo 360 ..You can post your blog or blast from the Messenger itself .. You can also add your friends through Yahoo Messenger . ..
• Contact names are visible in Conferences and Chatrooms .. This was really needed ..
  
• New Report as Spam feature .. Now you can ignore spammers as well as notify Yahoo to add them to black list .. Another nice addon ..
  
• And some others like you can set the individual ringtones and search from conference or chat windows , lots of audibles for Indian users .. ..

Now .. What are new bugs in YIM 7 (Beta) :

•    As this was a beta release, many bugs were expected .. As soon as I installed the new version, it asked me to reboot the system .. Hell .. I hadnt rebooted my system for week now and a program like messenger was asking to reboot WinXP .. Anyways .. I rebooted and Yahoo Messenger started by itself on the next boot .. And crashed instantly .. There you go I thought ..
  
•    Anyways .. It logged me in when I started it again .. New icons in Systray looked cool .. I thought it used less resources than the previous one .. but I wasnt able to prove it .. Anyways .. I liked the new look . .. I got the invite to enter the conf ..and everyone’s display names were shown as in my address book .. Good going .. I thought .. Then I found something is missing .. I wanted to disable voice chat .. but the button was nowhere to be seen .. A bit of juggling showed me that it was now in the menu .. Thats not good
• Anyways . .. I clicked on Conference to call other freinds to the conf .. And this new Join Conference box came up ..    Earlier only those contacts which were Online and were not in the Conf room were displayed in the Messenger list but now it showed all my contacts .. . Argh .. this is troublesome .. Finding who is not in the room and exploring my 100+ contacts was not gonna fun .. Anyways .. I thought maybe they ‘ll put this up in the Final version ..
  
•     Another surprise came when I clicked on a link posted by someone in the Conf window .. As soon as I clicked it, an error message popped up .. It even pop up when you only select a link .. Argh .. This is pain .. To open the link posted in the conf window, I had to select the link alongwith the poster’s name and then Ctrl C to copy .. And then Ctrl V to paste it to my browser and remove the author’s name to open the link ..
  
•    Then I decided to send a file to my friend and the notification came up that my friend was using a “different version” of Yahoo Messenger so “some features” were not available .. File Transfer included those . .. My friend was using Gaim … Curiously Call button was not disabled.. I decided not to test that Call with Gaim …
  
•    Soon I figured out that File transfer was actually not supported at all .. Even with friends using YIM7 too .. If I send a file to my freind he never get the notification and vice versa .. .. I hope this will be fixed in the final version .. I tried to use Recieve File feature to find out that the feature is missing too..
  
• Now I was getting annoyed .. Anyways .. I decided to test it for a day or two so that I can write an elaborate review like this ..
• Last night I needed to send an offline messege to my friend but damn .. where is the View menu in the main window ..? How can I enable viewing offline friends ..? I remembered the Shortcut key Ctrl H though.. But after a little searching I found it was now in Contacts menu .. Lol I thought ..
• After three days of beta testing and about 30-35 crashes, I decided that now is the time of beta version to leave .. So I ran the Yahoo Messenger 6’s installer (without uninstalling prev version) and YIM 6 was back .. But now it was with a surprise .. Two new tabs were added to YIM6 too .. Buzz and Yahoo360 .. Lol .. I thought .. I tested posting from YIM6 and it worked well .. Everything else is perfectly normal though .. So .. If you want to have Yahoo 360 support in your Yahoo Messenger 6, install the YIM7 Beta and then install YIM6 again over it
  

All in all .. Even though I liked the new features in the Yahoo Messenger, but because of its frequent crashes and bugs I started calling it YMess 7 .. I think its a bit cooler nick than Yahell 😀 .. But certainly .. I am waiting for the final version .. I hope it will be soon out with all those creepy bugs removed and it will surely rock .. I will look forward to have RSS support in Yahoo Messenger too ..

You can download the Beta version from here : US Version and Indian Version

The main difference between Indian version and US version is that Indian version got a ton of Indian audibles but it has no PC to PC calls feature as VoIP is still illegal in India as one of the comments pointed out..