Samsung Unveils ChatON Service To Compete With iMessage, BBM, And Others

Samsung has announced that it will be rolling out a new messaging service that will allow users to chat across multiple devices. ChatON will be offered in over 120 countries in 62 languages. The service supports photos, video, voice messaging, location, contact sharing, calendar, and other multimedia content. The interesting part is that Samsung is looking to take ChatON outside its own ecosystem.

The service will be supported on all major platforms according to Samsung. That includes tablets, feature phones, the PC, and Bada. The service will support group chat, direct linking between specific buddies, and it will have an interaction rank. That last one ranks the users based on how often they interact with you as far as I can make out.

ChatON also has a trunk service, which is a place where you can store files and content to share with others. You can communicate with friends using animated messages, which appear to be short video clips. This is obviously aimed at being a direct competitor to other services already out there like iMessage and BBM. What do you think, will this be a good thing or an also ran?