Aside from GTalk, it's been a while since I used Jabber. I've been happy with Pidgin 2.2.2 on my N800, and I'm looking forward to using Pidgin 2.2.2 on the N810.

My previous experience with Jabber was "use only as a last resort, if no other resources were available." I've seen intermittent transport failures on the servers I used, and I saw some pretty bizzare XML translation errors. Stuff such as font changes, use of HTML (anchor tags), or avatar/icon changes weren't being passed through Jabber correctly.

What's the state of Jabber now? Does OpenFire support formatting, HTML, and avatars?

Having a tablet-friendly server with services to the tablet user community sounds promising.