Category: Phones
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A SIP phone for the iPod Touch! (Just add microphone…
Continue Reading: A SIP phone for the iPod Touch! (Just add microphone…Fascinating development on the Apple frontier… in late December some developers posted information about a SIP phone for the iPod Touch! They included this helpful demonstration video:The team has obviously received a lot of questions and has therefore released a lengthy FAQ list. If you have an iPod Touch, you can download the software. Of course, you really need a microphone to use it… which the Touchmods folks are building.
All in all an interesting development. I look forward to seeing how it moves along!
Technorati Tags: apple, ipod touch, sip
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SIP phone soon to be available on iPhone and iPod Touch?
Continue Reading: SIP phone soon to be available on iPhone and iPod Touch?Will there soon be a native SIP client on the iPhone and iPod Touch? Dameon Welch-Abernathy writes on his VoIP weblog that some developers have gotten a basic SIP stack working on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The limited details available are over on The Unofficial Apple Weblog:iPhone hacker eok writes to let me know that he and Samuel have gotten SIP registration and signalization working. They took a few mobile terminal shots, but the real work is being done via ssh. Samuel is working on connecting the audio in/out to the pjSIP. If you have iPhone or iPod touch coding skills and want to get involved in the project, connect to #touchmods on irc.undernet.org. It looks like most of the work will be done on European time.
As you can see in the screenshots, this is still very early in the development. Still, it’s great to see this kind of development taking place.Technorati Tags: sip, voip, apple, iphone, ipod touch
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“Tryphone” lets you try out various new mobile phones online
Continue Reading: “Tryphone” lets you try out various new mobile phones onlineBy way of a ZDNet blog, I learned of “Tryphone” a site that lets you “try out” various new mobile phones online. It currently just has the Apple iPhone, LG Muziq, Blackberry Pearl and Samsung Juke… but of course lets you buy the phone immediately after trying it if you wish. I don’t know that something like this can ever replace the experience of actually holding the phone in your hand, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.
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Use Skype from anywhere (providing you have GSM coverage) – Skype releases “3Skypephone” and joins the mobile game
Continue Reading: Use Skype from anywhere (providing you have GSM coverage) – Skype releases “3Skypephone” and joins the mobile gameThe big news out today in the world of Skype is that Skype and the mobile carrier called “3” have released the “3 Skypephone” that lets Skype users take Skype truly mobile. Skype-to-Skype calls and IMs are “free” provided that you are on “3”‘s mobile network. I say “free” in quotes because of course you have to have a wireless plan through 3. There are actually two options in the UK, which is the only country in which it will initially be available:
- Monthly – With this plan, the 3 Skypephone hardware itself is free and the rates are 12-17 British pounds per month. Apparently you have unlimited data connectivity with this plan, so you can in fact make unlimited numbers of Skype calls or IMs.
- Pay-As-You-Go – With this plan, you pay 50 pounds for the 3Skypephone phone itself and then keep your account filled with credits. Apparently data usage decrements this account (but it’s not clear by how much), so you have to wonder how often people will need to recharge the account. (UPDATE: Julian Bond, who is in the UK and has a 3 Skypephone to experiment with, informs me that there is apparently…
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Zoiper – a free SIP / IAX softphone for Windows, Linux or Mac
Continue Reading: Zoiper – a free SIP / IAX softphone for Windows, Linux or MacIn watching Jay Phillips do his great presentation here today at AstriCon about Ruby and his Adhearsion package, I found myself wondering what the interesting little softphone was that he was using. It turned out to be “Zoiper“, an IAX or SIP softphone that was previously called “Idefisk”. (I can understand perhaps why they changed the name… “Idefisk” does not exactly roll off your tongue.) There turn out to be two versions (comparison chart here): a free version and a “Zoiper Biz” version which includes more functionality and starts around 30 euros.
Clearly built for Asterisk, it was interesting to note that it supports both SIP and also Asterisk’s own IAX protocol. Anyway, I just thought I’d share that this softphone is out there if you were not aware of it.
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Suggestions for a VERY small, portable, *wired* headset/mic for travel?
Continue Reading: Suggestions for a VERY small, portable, *wired* headset/mic for travel?As I packed for my travel to IT Expo early tomorrow morning, I was again annoyed that I still haven’t found a great headset (with microphone) for travelling. A little bit ago, I bought the Logitech “Premium Notebook Headset” which is in fact a very nice headset. Audio sounds great, fits well, works great with all the various VoIP softphones I use… I have no real complaints about how it functions. I bought it in part because it folds flat and has a nice hardshell case. But it has a problem – it’s still too darn big!
I never check bags when on business travel. I have my “roller” travel luggage and then my laptop bag on top of that. Space is at an absolute premium. And given that I cram a lot of equipment into my laptop bag, having a small but hard plastic case is really critical. (As previous (destroyed!) headsets without cases will attest!) An example that works is my wonderful Sennheiser PCX 100 headphones that fold up into this nice little hard case that is about 5.5 inches long, 3 inches wide and 1 inch deep. Fantastic! (Curiously, though, Sennheiser doesn’t seem to make them…
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A not-very-publicized change with the Blackberry 8830 unleashes the real power of unified messaging!
Continue Reading: A not-very-publicized change with the Blackberry 8830 unleashes the real power of unified messaging!There’s one little feature in my Blackberry 8830 that I just discovered today that I didn’t see anywhere in any of the promotional materials about it. Put simply:
Unified messaging works!
Here’s the thing… given that I work for Mitel, I of course have “unified messaging” set up so that whenever someone leaves me a voicemail message, I get an email with the WAV file attached to it. It’s truly a wonderful thing because I never dial in to check to see if I have messages. I get an email that clues me in to that fact – and generally when I am on my desktop PC, I just play the attached WAV file and listen to the message through my email program. I don’t dial into voicemail to listen.
Before, with my Blackberry 7290 or any of the other earlier models, having this unified messaging feature enabled was really only a “half solution”. Receiving the email clued you in to the fact that you now had a voicemail message… BUT…
you couldn’t listen to the WAV file!
The Blackberry operating system couldn’t play the WAV file, so you had to dial into the voicemail system to listen to the…
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The other story about the recording of the Telecom Junkies podcast: Interview with a VoIP Hacker – a.k.a. why my voice levels are so different
Continue Reading: The other story about the recording of the Telecom Junkies podcast: Interview with a VoIP Hacker – a.k.a. why my voice levels are so differentWhy does my voice change in audio quality about half-way through the new Telecom Junkies podcast? Here’s the story.
A few minutes ago I posted to both the Voice of VoIPSA weblog and also the Blue Box podcast site a note about the new Telecom Junkies podcast that features an interview with Robert Moore, one of the two people involved with the large VoIP fraud cast last year. About mid-way through my connection dies and you hear Jason saying “Oh, we lost Dan!” and then I’m back, but with a much softer voice.
Since it says something about telephony – and since I’m also interested in relaying lessons for podcasting – here’s what happened.
In the hotel I was staying at in Florida, I was getting pretty poor connections using my AT&T GSM phone (the replacement Blackberry had not yet arrived). I’d noticed that when calling people from my room, even if I went out onto the balcony, calls would still drop out sometimes – even when I was sitting still. Now I don’t know if this was because I was on the 20th floor (room 2048, what a great geek number!) or because I was at just a…
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Blackberry 8830’s GSM – it only works *outside* of North America!
Continue Reading: Blackberry 8830’s GSM – it only works *outside* of North America!Replying to my last post about the new Blackberry 8830, Jim Courtney of Skype Journal left a comment clueing me into one minor little detail about the 8830’s GSM support – it only works outside of North America!
Indeed, the GSM side of the 8830 operates at 900 and 1800 MHz which are used for GSM throughout the rest of the world, but it does not work at 850 and 1900 MHz, which are the frequencies used by GSM in North America. The disappointment for me is that when I drive to Ottawa, there are patches of road in Ontario where there just isn’t all that great CDMA… and it would be great if the 8830 would flip over to GSM to get the stronger signal. However, that doesn’t look like it will happen.
One wonders why not. When RIM was creating the 8830, why didn’t they include support for all 4 bands? Is it perhaps because Verizon and other North American CDMA carriers want to keep people on CDMA in North America? (You could see the case where in a particular NA city the GSM signal might be stronger in an area. If the phone switches to that stronger…
