I suppose it's only a matter of time before one of these persistent web clients / services converts me, but my current setup works surprisingly well:

- Irssi + screen on my server.

- IrssiNotifier [1] for push notifications to my Android phone when I'm hilighted/PM'd.

- Connect from my phone using Irssi ConnectBot [2], which is just an SSH client that supports gestures for interacting with Irssi (swipe left/right to switch channels, double tap to go to a hilight, swipe up/down to scroll the channel log, etc).

- Connection via mosh [3] instead of plain SSH. Mosh uses UDP, which allows persistent connections when switching from Wi-Fi to cellular data, or when data connections are spotty, etc. On my phone, I actually use a patched version of Irssi ConnectBot [4] which supports mosh.

That said, as well as this works, I've always kept an envious eye on browser-based implementations like this. I love thinking about all the fun integrations that would be possible to make IRC a much more rich experience: automatically showing YouTube thumbnails/descriptions, expanding shortened links, hover-to-show image links, etc.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.iki.murgo.i... [2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.woltage.ir... [3]: http://mosh.mit.edu/ [4]: http://dan.drown.org/android/mosh/