Imo.im launches long-awaited iPad app refresh – and surprise, it looks like its iPhone app

Imo announced a new iPad app, with a design that mimics its existing iPhone app to provide users a seamless cross-platform experience, while also adding a few new features, like VoIP.

For quite some time now, Imo’s iPad app remained untouched, while new updates were being pushed to its Android and iPhone app. Yesterday Imo finally announced an updated iPad app that brings the design and interface up to speed with what iPhone and iPod Touch users have been playing around with since early November of this year.

The iPad app is essentially a replica of the existing iPhone app, but fit to the larger screen. A slight difference between the iPhone and iPad app that you’ll notice is that when you click on a contact’s profile picture, their contact information opens up in a floating box on the iPad app instead of opening up a new page. Also on the new iPad app the list of contacts has been fixed to the left-hand panel instead of the right, which is where it was located in the previous iPad version. On the iPhone app, you had to swipe to open up the contact list.

What will be new to its iPad users, aside from the redesign, is the VoIP and group photo sharing features that have been a staple of the Imo 2.0 redesign that’s been pushed to smartphones.

“Our VoIP feature and UI redesigns for iPhone and Android have proven extremely popular, and many of our users have requested these same functionalities on our iPad app. The recent changes to our iPhone and Android apps have been received very well, and now we’re able to offer the same user experience whether on the computer, smartphone or tablet. We want our users to have an easy, streamlined way to communicate with friends on all of our platforms, especially for people using multiple devices,” ” Imo.im CEO Ralph Harik told Digital Trends.

To recap, you can share photos with a group of friends by adding them to a group chat and sharing photos from your smartphone’s gallery. Or you can opt to take pictures with Imo’s in-app camera, which is a particularly useful feature should you want to pool all the photos that you and your friends from an event. Every photo that you take is automatically uploaded to the group’s chat and gallery in real-time – Facebook launched the real-time upload feature after Imo’s redesign. And after these photos are uploaded to the shared gallery, you can go back and browse, delete, or download the uploaded photos.

The other major feature added to iPad is VoIP capability. Calls over 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi can be made to your Imo contacts without the calls eating into your carrier’s allotted monthly minutes.

Imo has been seeing increasing adoption rates as budding contender among messenger apps filling in for where Meebo bowed out, which is good news for the company. So far across platforms, Imo has been downloaded on five million mobile devices and sees 700,000 unique daily users with 50 million messages being sent on a daily basis.

But there’s room to grow as the competition among messaging apps intensifies. You might have noticed that the latest updates to Imo have been concerned with introducing new native features to Imo’s own messaging platform. Since its founding, Imo has integrated third-party messaging apps like AIM, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and others. But as the messaging space matures and the upper crust of contenders like Whatsapp, Nimbuzz, Kakao Talk, LINE, and WeChat are vying for the global market with their proprietary messaging platforms, mid-sized niche competitors like Imo have to build out their own native mobile products. 

You can download the new iPad update here.