Although I only have a handful of friends I chat (through Instant Messaging) with on a regular basis, they each have their own “favorite” IM client and refuse to use others.

I’ve tried time and again to “unify” them under a single IM protocol, but in vain.

That’s why I use Multi-Protocol IM clients like Digsby when I’m on a PC.

But ever since getting my BlackBerry Bold, this became a problem for me again.

Now, RIM (Research In Motion, the makers of BlackBerry) does provide serviceable clients for the major IM protocols (GTalk, AIM, Y!, MSN) for free. And there are a number of free clients that provide multi-protocol support, such as Instango and Palringo.

The problem with the former is that having each client running will take up precious device memory. Since the BlackBerry Bold is notoriously short of device memory, this can become a major problem.

The problem with the latter is that… well, while they do support multi-protocol, the support seemed rather flaky from my experiences with them.

Enter BeeJive, formerly known as JiveTalk.

This is also a multi-protocol client, but the beauty of it is that they have a dedicated server sitting in the middle, between my BlackBerry and the actual IM servers. This way, BeeJive provides a more stable experience.

Come to think of it, Instango and Palringo use a similar approach too, but through the Jabber(XMPP) protocol. The BlackBerry connects to their server using the XMPP protocol, which in turns routes the connection to the respective IM servers through XMPP transports.

Maybe it’s just me, but connection through XMPP transports are often fickle. I’ve had connections dropping at random interval, and sometimes the transport just won’t let me log into the IM server.

I don’t know what protocol BeeJive uses, but I suspect that they’ve developed a proprietary one for their use. In any case, it works really well for me.

But BeeJive comes with a caveat, which can be a real biggie for some people.

It’s not free.

You have to dish out US$19.95 for a one-device license, meaning that you have to purchase the license again if you ever lose your phone, or upgrade to a new one.
If you want to be protected against such changes, you’ll need to pay US$29.95.

BeeJive does offer a 30-day free trial, so you have a full month to test it out before deciding whether it’s worth the money.

In my case, the answer was a resounding “yes”.

But BeeJive isn’t all perfect, though; I’ve had it crashing on me with some “unhandled java exception” errors 3 times in a month of usage.
It also locked up my phone once when I tried to use its feature of grabbing a phone number from chat, adding it directly to Contacts.

That doesn’t change the fact that it’s still the most stable Multi-Protocol IM available for the BlackBerry at the moment, and that’s enough reason for me to be worth $19.95.

OK, I’ve finally decided to go with 15mm.

The greatest advantages of 20mm are commonly thought to be the comparatively cheap cost (if you use plastic infantry), and the availability of models.

But once I started considering metal infantry figures (as I didn’t fancy the static poses of the plastic ones), I realized that the cost advantage pretty much disappears.

And regarding availability of models, I realized that with the explosive growth in popularity of FoW, it’s actually easier now to find a model in 15mm than in 1/72 scale.
If you take Battlefront, Peter Pig, and QRF together, models of practically every vehicle/figure you may want for WWII wargaming can be found.

To finally convince myself, I worked out a quick spreadsheet to compare the cost of the different options.

Assuming that you want to make an infantry platoon of 40 men, the costs involved will be:

Item Name                  Packs Price    Reqd Total
------------------------------------------------------
28mm Infantry (Artizan)      4   ￡  5.00  10  ￡ 50.00
20mm Infantry (AB Figures)  10   ￡ 10.00   4  ￡ 40.00
1/72 Infantry (Revell)      40   ￡  5.00   1  ￡  5.00
15mm Infantry (Battlefront) 40   ￡ 10.80   1  ￡ 10.80
15mm Infantry (QRF)          8   ￡  2.00   5  ￡ 10.00

One important point to note is that while Revell and Battlefront packs all the figures necessary to make up a platoon (i.e. command, mortar, rifles, etc), you’ll actually need to buy and mix separate packs with the other manufacturers.
(e.g. 1 pack Command + 1 pack Mortar + 1 pack SMG + 1 pack LMG + 4 packs Rifle)
So unless you’re fitting out several platoons at once, you’ll need to buy more packs than what I’ve calculated above.

Now we’ll come to tanks, assuming you’re building a 3-tank platoon:

Item Name                   Price    Reqd  Total
---------------------------------------------------
1/56 Tiger 1 (Hobby Master) ￡ 10.00  3    ￡ 30.00
1/72 Tiger 1 (Revell)       ￡  5.00  3    ￡ 15.00
15mm Tiger 1 (Battlefront)  ￡  5.85  3    ￡ 17.55
15mm Tiger 1 (QRF)          ￡  5.00  3    ￡ 15.00

So, if you’re planning to build 2 infantry platoons (40 men each) and 1 tank platoon (3 tanks), the total cost will be:

Composition              Price
---------------------------------
2 Inf + 1 Tnk (28mm)     ￡ 130.00
2 Inf + 1 Tnk (20mm)     ￡  95.00
2 Inf + 1 Tnk (15mm BF)  ￡  39.15
2 Inf + 1 Tnk (15mm QRF) ￡  35.00
2 Inf + 1 Tnk (1/72)     ￡  25.00


I have to add a disclaimer that this is only intended to be a very rough estimate. As I’ve mentioned above, the actual cost can be a bit higher if you use manufacturers other than Battlefront and Revell, because you’ll need to buy packs of different types of infantry figures.

But then again, most manufacturers offer bulk discounts, so I guess the small differences will kind of cancel each other out.
Oh, and shipping is another very important factor to think about.

Anyway, if I rule out the option of using 1/72 plastic infantry, the cheapest and best option would be 15mm.

Hope all this research I’ve done will prove useful to others!

I took one look at this illuminative side-by-side comparison done by NapNuts, and was totally taken aback.

Above: Tamiya 1/48 Sherman with (L-R) Artizan, Crusader, BTD, Tamiya 1/48 (picture courtesy of NapNuts Singapore Wargamers/Wargames)

Full Comparison: http://www.napnuts.com/gallery_tamiya48.htm

They’ve basically put 28mm figures from Artizan, Crusader and Black Tree Designs (the three “Big Names” in 28mm WW2 miniatures) next to a 1/48 figure from Tamiya… and the results are pretty shocking.

Standing next to an actual anatomically correct Tamiya model, the 28mm ones look so grotesque and disfigured!

To think that I actually thought that these 28mm models looked realistic… what was I smoking? (figuratively speaking – I don’t smoke)

All that time spent with Warhammer 40K miniatures must have really skewed my sense of aesthetics.

But then I hear that these beautiful Tamiya models aren’t really built for wargaming, and tend to be very fragile. More bad news is that 1/48 isn’t as popular a scale as 1/32 or even 1/72, so I’ll have trouble finding a good variety of models for wargaming.

Oh, well. Guess I won’t be using either 28mm or 1/48.

Back to deliberating between 15mm and 20mm…