You said there were a lot of messaging apps on Windows Phone? Sure. Here’s another app – Kakaotalk. They have won a couple of awards already, and recently, they launched a Windows Phone version (they’re one of the Top Developers on Google Play), and obviously, I decided to give it a spin.

When you first fire the application, you’re asked to register with your phone number. After you’re done with it, the app draws your Contacts list and syncs it with your Kakaotalk account. Then it displays a list of your contacts who have a Kakaotalk account, under the “Friends” column.

There are a total 4 columns, in the app. Friends, Chats, Suggests and More.

• Friends, like I said, houses all of your contacts who are using / have used Kakaotalk before.
• Chats, is self-explanatory.
• The Suggests column is supposed to show suggestions, but it was always empty for me.
• The More column is where you have to go to edit your profile, change settings. There’s a Notices tile as well, which will show you all new notifications, except chat Notifications.

Coming back to Chats. You can initiate a 1:1 chat with your friends, or make a voice call directly. Of course, by friends, I mean the Kakaotalk friends. But if you want to start a group chat, you’ll have to go to the Chats column, tap on “…” and select “New”. Doing that will open your Friends’ list, and you can select the friends you want to, and chat all the way to glory. Group voice calling would have been a great addition, though I guess it’s asking too much.

There’s one exclusive feature, though. And it’s only available to the Windows Phone version of the app – Draw With Fingers. It’s a great addition, frankly, and I like the idea. To use this, you’ll have to tap on the + symbol on the bottom, in a chat, and select Draw With Fingers. It basically brings up a white-space with a color palate, and you set the thickness of the ink. Then, you can Draw with your Fingers. You can also save it to your picture library, and that’s what it basically is – an image. Only it’s quite good, even though very basic. I’d like to see more of this across apps, and better yet, a standalone app.

But apart from that, the experience is somewhat.. bad. I mean, there are a lot of areas where the app lags a lot. And by lot, I really mean lot. It takes at least 5-6 seconds for the app to open up and when you tap on a chat, it takes another 2-3 seconds. And the app also disables Prediction (virtual keyboard prediction), and that’s really irritating, because I rely a lot of auto-correct because I type very fast. And I have fat thumbs.

WhatsApp also takes 5-6 seconds when you open the app, but, almost everyone I chat with, on phone, uses WhatsApp. That’s about 60% of my total contacts, compared to 2.5% on Kakaotalk. That’s one major disadvantage, and the fact that WhatsApp has a very simple, minimalist UI, also keeps me away from Kakaotalk.

Bottomline – most of the messaging apps on Windows Phone don’t cut it. Which is not their fault, really. It’s an issue with the OS, not the apps, but well.

Kakaotalk for Windows Phone is a free app in the Marketplace, and you can get it here.