First off the new boy of S60 IRC mIRGGI is starting to turn into a much more mature product, it's not as slick as WirelessIRC yet, but it offers other functionality and more importantly is currently the only native S60 3rd edition client.

Onto UIQ, the venerable Quirc is still the Daddy on UIQ2, and it looks like a UIQ3 port is on the cards very shortly, as Quirc author Bowman has recently obtained a Sony Ericsson P1i.

And back to S60, the surprise news of the week is that the classic WirelessIRC is due for a new release in the next week or so, for S60 3rd edition! For an app that's been barely touched since the heady days of the Nokia 7650 and 3650 this is quite a surprise.

I've been chatting with the author (over irc of course), and he seems optimistic and excited about the new version. I used to love WirelessIRC, and I was concerned about the fate of the previous version, but I've been assured the new version won't turn into abandonware again. The previous reasons were that he got snowed under developing other Mobileways products, and that GPRS data plans in Germany used to be stupidly expensive to be online all the time, so he couldn't afford to scratch his own itch.

New features in WirelessIRC include a revolutionary UI, (configurable) auto-posting of urls to your del.icio.us account, /away and /me messages can be sent to Twitter, and a bundle of othe interesting looking functionality. It sounds like there are a few other features in the pipeline, such as a link manager, and del.icio.us <-> phone bookmarks synch. Logging (and possibly auto-posting to your blog or to a webdav dir) is currently being considered, my impression is that he's very open to feedback and ideas.

Oh, and irc on the iPhone? Yeah, it might be posible via some web app (cgi:irc perhaps) I guess, but who cares?