MSN Messenger 7 Final

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MSN Messenger 7 Final

Aalaap Ghag, Apr 10, 2005 0000 hrs IST

Is it still an evil upgrade to 6.2?

Display picture icons, dynamic display pictures, personal messages, What I'm Listening to, handwriting

Stupid winks, pointless nudges, distracting backgrounds, sort of bulky

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A while ago we previewed the MSN Messenger 7 Public Beta in which I told you about the new features offered in it, and also how useless they are. Now Microsoft has released the much-anticipated final version of MSN Messenger 7 Build 777. Last time we only showcased the features and, although we were very subjective about the verdict on those, we didn't give it any rating since it was a preview of a beta, and not a review. But now the time has come for the final judgement.

Since we've already done the introduction of the features before, we won't go into a lot of detail again, since not much has actually changed in this final release. We'll only look at what's brand spankin' new in MSN Messenger 7. Even the public beta was quite stable; it never crashed for me, although the same could not be said about the "leaked" version prior to that. We have winks, we have nudges, we have borderless contact list windows, handwriting ability and other cosmetic changes. Refer to our MSN Messenger 7 Beta Preview for details.

Now you have the contact's display picture shown as an icon instead of the standard green/red/yellow buddy icons, which is a nice personalisation touch. Speaking of display pictures, there's also the concept of dynamic display pictures in the new MSN Messenger 7. Dynamic Display Pictures are simply a collection of pictures depicting your different "moods" like happy, sad, sleepy, etc and the interesting part is that they are automatically triggered when you use relevant emoticons like :-) (happy) :-( (sad) or |-) (sleepy). The sad news is that they are still unavailable to Indian users, as these dynamic pictures are only available via certain content partners, none of which are Indian at the moment. Hence, no screenshot!

Another new feature is Personal Messages. Right under your nickname in the main contact window, you can type a message that is displayed next to your nickname in your buddies' MSN Messenger 7 windows. This is exactly like Yahoo! Messenger's custom status options, just that in Yahoo! it shows up as "aalaap (this is my custom status)", while in MSN Messenger 7 it shows up as "Aalaap - This is my custom status". CTRL-C, CTRL-V! Nearly, as this personal message feature also has another option - "What I'm Listening To" - which lets MSN Messenger 7 indicate to your contacts what music you're listening to. It works with Windows Media Player out of the box, but with a little tweaking, will also work with Winamp. For that, you'll need the MSN Messenger Music Plugin".

Next to the "Send" button in the conversation window, there's also a "Search" button that let's you instantly search whatever you type in the box. But this doesn't simply fire up your browser pointing it to MSN Search! It's actually "Shared Search", which goes and searches MSN Search and then returns a few results to both you and your contact!