Anybox review

We review the new instant messenger service for iOS devices, Anybox, which imaginatively brings email into the IM fold

There's absolutely no shortage of instant messenger and social networking services that focus on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. In fact, it's getting to saturation point for IM applications on the App Store with little in the way of elbow room on people's home screens for more notification-equipped communication networks. Therefore, Anybox has got it's work cut out to make an impact in this overfull genre.

Fortunately, Anybox has a unique string to its bow that could help it to be heard above the white noise of instant messenger systems: it manages to incorporate email into the fold. That might not sound immediately interesting, but after you send your first couple of messages to Anybox, it becomes clear just what an important feature this is.

Your first task is to set up a unique username, which takes the form of an Anybox.me email address. For people to send you a message, which pops up on the iPhone's screen straight away thanks to its instant notification feature, all they need to do is send it to your email username.

It's here you can see the importance of the email integration. Anyone with access to email can send you an Anybox instant message, delivering a beautifully simple method of giving the iPhone push email. It's not presented within the app as an email client, however, but as conversations in much the same style as the native text messaging app, or most any other instant messenger. This is no bad thing at all, as it turns the emails from messages into conversations.

Sadly, it's also at this point that Anybox grinds to halt. The app can only reply to Anybox usernames on devices also running the application. This aspect of the app is as clean and basically functional as any rival IM application, allowing you to send and receive photos as well as short text messages, but there's nothing especially extraordinary about being able to send text between iPhones any more.

Although its messaging service would be perfectly functional for anyone who is indeed running the app - as you might as well keep those conversations close to the source - not being able to reply to someone who first contacted you via email feels like a significant shortcoming. Anybox is on the cusp of an opportunity to take itself massively cross-platform-being compatible with anyone who has email (and who doesn't?) but stumbles at the last hurdle.

One way messages are of little use, and while the app exhibits a couple of more forgivable quirks (your username can't be less than eight characters, rather bizarrely, and messages are limited to 250 characters), being able to receive a message but not reply to it is crippling.

Without the otherwise excellent email integration, Anybox is just another basic IM app, which is why it's such a crying shame this limitation is present.

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