I certainly did... I got sick of their spam

haiiii guysss wat this suppose to mean me to got that frm service buddy why nokia doing this to us while no other new updates are available for nokia n900 is this complete stopping of chat fascility in phone or just ovi .....pls hlp clarify

I just went into "Availability", clicked on my Ovi account and disabled it. Sorted.

...if you want a free decent chat service, just sign up for Gmail. Google talk is just XMPP/Jabber. Much better than Ovi chat anyway IMHO.

What I want to confirm is whether they mean to break the entire chat functionality in contacts - eg Facebook or all the Pigdin protocols. (Or the Skype chatline?) Which is what the message sounds like to me. (And if there is any way to stop Nokia removing functionality from their software.)

So if you want to use *any* chat, including gtalk, you might need to find a client, except there isn't one. Except apparently for IRC.

I've never got any use from the ovi chat. The other nokia phones used a yahoo system rather than the XMPP/jabber, which causes a lot of confusion, especially as everybody gets accounts on both (entirely seperate) systems. I got recognition of that issue from Nokia's twitter help a couple of weeks back; I hope this isn't their response. It would help with the confusion, in that it makes the problem bigger and more obvious.

It's not a good sign for anyone looking at the meego phone if this is the way Nokia treats maemo.

Also - I have firefox as my default browser on the n900, so if I open the link in the servicebuddy IM it tells me to visit the page using my mobile phone. Huh? (It's looking for the built in browser.)

Took me a while to work that one out, could have done with a hint.

Pidgin?.......

The built in conversations chat is just a multiprotocol client. It doesn't use any nokia servers at all - only the Ovi chat obviously does.

None of your FB/GTalk/Jabber/Skype/etc chat services will stop working until the servers you're using change the protocol, and even then aside from skype, the plugins are all open source (using pidgin's libs, no less), so you have nothing to worry about.

I much prefer the integrated clients to pidgin, but maybe that's just me.

I really like the PR stunt to spam those, who like to use ovi chat until the end of lifetime.

mr_jrt - Thanks. I am reassured. That corresponds with my ideas about what is possible/sane for nokia to do, but the message didn't read that way to me.

I've pottered about in the repositories - I'm using the pidgin plugins, as you say - but never noticed a separate pidgin client.

BTW, since I have you attention - does anyone know a way to log in to the yahoo-version ovi (as opposed to XMPP) on the n900? Nokia help doesn't seem to. [see http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1025620]

Ideally such a solution would last beyond the end of the month.