English

Noun

imps

1. Plural of imp

      IMPS may also refer to "Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite", an April Fools' Day RFC.

IMPS stands for Instant Messaging and Presence Service. It is an OMA enabler for Instant Messaging and Presence. The Wireless Village consortium developed the first cut of the specifications. After Wireless Village was merged with OMA, its specs became OMA IMPS 1.0 specifications. IMPS is widely deployed but not necessarily marketed. Interworking between several operators IMPS platforms is being performed under a GSMA initiative that encourages interworking and deployment of Instant Messaging.

Vanilla terminals often have IMPS clients.

On Nokia, the chat client is accessed via the "My Presence" menu.

On Sony Ericsson, it's called "My Friends".

On Motorola, it's called "IM". The phones' chat clients are generally designed to be provider neutral, so you have to put in the Wireless Village server settings.

If your phone doesn't have an inbuilt chat client, you might still be able to get a third-party chat application that runs on your phone's Symbian, Java ME, BREW, or other application environment. You need to get a chat client which is "Wireless Village compliant presence-enabled".

Note that it is still necessary for the operator to provide the IM service and/or one will have to connect to a third party server for connection with others for IM'ing

Compatible terminals

This is only a partial list. Many phones sold today support IMPS, especially phones from these manufacturers.

• Nokia
  • 3220, 3500, 6020, 6021, 6120, 6220, 6230, 6230i, 6300, 6630, 6820, 5140, 6810, 7200, 7260, 7270, 7610, 8800, E50, E51, E60, E61, E62, E65, E70, N70, N72,N73, N95
• Motorola
  • V500, V600, E398, V3, V3xx
• Sony Ericsson
  • K310, J300i, F500i, K300i, K310i, K500i, K510i, K550i, K600i, K610i, K700i, K750i, K790i, K800i, S700i, T206, T630, T637, V800, W550i, W200i, W800i, W810i, W850i, W880i, W900i, Z500A, Z800, Z1010
• Siemens AG
  • CX70, CX75, M65, SK65, S75
• BenQ-Siemens
  • S68, E71, EL71, M81

Product Vendors

• Colibria
• OZ Communication IMPS
• Neustar IMPS
• Wireless ZT IMPS
• Miyowa
• Communology

Known Service Providers

• noknok MTN South Africa, South Africa's 1st operator launched IMPS service launched with OMA IMPS CSP 1.2 compatible services including SMS and MMS integration. It does not work with native IMPS applications on phones however.
• Yamigo free IMPS service.
• MobJab Free IMPS
• chatNU IMPS Denmark
• SMSLine Russia

See also

• Wireless Village
• Open Mobile Alliance - an industry consortium that manages the IMPS specification
• IMPS specification V.1.3a
• IMPS specification V.1.2.1
• IMPS specification V.1.1