After AT&T’s announcement last fall that they would allow VoIP applications to use the 3G network very little has happened. No applications offering such services have actually been approved by Apple to be sold in the Apps Store. Until now, that is. Today our customer Toktumi announced that their latest upgrade of the Line2 application for iPhone has been approved by Apple. This application is touted by Toktumi as “the first iPhone calling app that works over 3G, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks using the same number”. This is pretty big news. The end user can get better call quality (HD Voice), improved coverage (through WiFi), and save a lot on call charges. VoIP applications have previously only been available on Symbian, Windows Mobile, and most recently Android devices, while maybe the most popular smartphone has lacked such support.

The Line2 application offers much more than just a standard VoIP application (As opposed to e.g. iCall, which is another VoIP application fro the iPhone). In fact, I use it on my Blackberry even though there is no VoIP support on that platform. This is because RIM hasn’t opened up the development environment in such a way that it is possible to develop a true VoIP application for the Blackberry environment. That topic is worth its own post so I will refrain from commenting more on this very frustrating issue…

Yesterday I started testing an Android mobile phone. It is an HTC Hero that we bought to use in our development. The phone itself is very iPhone like was my first impression (without having used an iPhone). Same type of touch screen interface.

I must say that so far I have been very impressed. The things I use most on my computer worked very well from the get go. I started with configuring the Exchange email client. It was very straightforward and as soon as this synced up I had my email, address book, and calendar synchronized at my fingertips. Adding my Google account gave me my private Gmail as well as my Google Talk IM service. Browser worked nicely. All in all, very quickly I had all the essentials working.

I came from a Symbian phone (Nokia E71 that I liked), but I must say that this feels like a new world. I can’t see the old fashioned Symbian phones competing with iPhone and Android for the smartphone experience of the future.

By the way, the HTC Hero works very nicely as a phone too. Stability seems to be there, no hangups or reboots so far.

The one thing missing is voice and video calling over IP. With an unlimited data plan and a good voice and video over IP application, not much need for traditional calling. But we will get there soon …

What’s smart about a smartphone? Well, there is no standard industry definition but to me it’s a phone that offers advanced capabilities that acts much like a PC – perhaps most glaring is that the phone portion of a smartphone is only a part of its offering.  Yesterday, Gartner stated that while worldwide sales of mobile phones fell 6 percent in Q2 ’09 from Q2 ’08 the sales of smartphones increased 27 percent.

“Despite the challenging market, some devices sold well as consumers who would usually have purchased standard midrange devices either cut back to less expensive handsets or moved up the range to get more features for their money,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner.

What’s interesting is that consumers have either gone for the high-end phones or the base model mobile phones – leaving the midrange phones to sink into oblivion. As smartphones increase, along with their processing power, memory and large screens for video – mobile VoIP will also become more prevalent as consumers become more educated on the benefits – especially the HD voice capabilities.

A recent report from Unstrung Insider makes interesting reading. John Blau a research analyst at Unstrung states: “Mobile VoIP is no longer just a cheap telephone call…The big advantage of VoIP is its ability to integrate with other systems and stimulate further adoption.”

Mobile networks, and operators will have to come to grips with these changes – because blocking VoIP calls to protect their voice revenues, will not be a sustainable strategy. “Sooner or later, mobile operators will be forced to deploy their own VoIP services, since next-generation networks such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMax are all-IP and do not support circuit voice,” added Blau.

“No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you,” said American author Zora Neale Hurston.  It’s that quest for the horizon that keeps researchers busy throughout the world. Two pieces of news caught my eyes this week – one came out of Japan on the news that Toyota and the Japanese government research laboratory demonstrated a brain/machine interface (BMI) that has been demonstrated to control a wheelchair using a person’s thoughts.

Japan has a rapidly aging population, which is set to be accompanied by a shortage of healthcare workers to tend to them – developments such as a brain/machine interface could help the aged maintain their self-sufficiency.  The system enables a person to make a wheelchair turn left, right, forward or stop simply by thinking the commands. The response time is in milliseconds – 125 milliseconds to be exact.

With a 125 milliseconds delay over a telephone call you would probably notice the delay, although it would still be acceptable by today’s standards. GIPS’ research team continues to work hard to improve the telephone and video delay issue – along with all the other intrinsic unhelpful traits of IP networks such as jitter, echo, packet-loss and background noise.  So it’s impressive to see this BMI development out of Japan – it could have far-reaching impact on our future.

The second development was simple yet is a welcome initiative in reducing the amount of unnecessary waste in the EU by introducing universal cell phone chargers – albeit for smartphones.

The EU commission requested the mobile phone industry to come forward with a voluntary commitment to provide a universal mobile phone charger, which should reach the market from 2010 onwards.

According to CNET, there are 400 million mobile phones in Europe, and approximately 185 million mobile phones are sold each year in Europe. It’s expected that over half of all new phones sold in 2010 will fall in the smartphone category. This is great news to read as smartphones are nearly all Wi-Fi enabled and have the ability to allow mobile VoIP – potentially great news for GIPS.

The universal mobile phone charger should lower packaging and shipping costs along with a reduction in carbon footprints for wireless carriers. The only downside for consumers is that the chargers will have to be purchased separately (eventually) – so hang on to your universal charger. Hopefully North America will follow suit too.

As I write this, Apple is announcing a new iPhone just blocks away from the GIPS office. Speculation about new features seems to revolve around a new camera with possible video recording capabilities.

While we have regularly written about the iPhone at the GIPS blog, we usually look through a next-generation communication lens. We speculate about what the openness of the Apple App store means for developers, if advanced camera capabilities will allow 2-way video, and if carriers will allow VoIP capabilities on the platform. This post is going to be none of those things. I want to take it down a notch and discuss the iPhone from the perspective of an average user. This has probably been done thousands of times before, in more informative and entertaining ways, but I am having a dilemma and have yet to find a succinct article that boils the topic down in a way that will help me reach a conclusion.  This may be that article.

You see, my contract with AT&T is about to expire, which naturally means I am looking for a new phone. I currently have the first generation Blackberry Curve, and while I am generally satisfied with the phone’s basic capabilities, I am routinely left looking for more. I enjoy getting my email pushed to me, I find the UI intuitive, and I like the full QWERTY keyboard. But every time I try to do something slightly more advanced, I get frustrated. The web browser is atrocious, the EDGE network is slow, and it might as well have a pinhole camera for photographs. Needless to say, I am not married to my current phone.

Which leads me to the iPhone. For the last 2+ years, I have been hearing iPhone users gush about how great their phones are. The browser is amazing. The touch screen is so easy to use. The display is bright and colorful. The App Store is awesome. But every time I borrow one, I find it completely unusable. For me, the iPhone is like the Arcade Fire: I really want to like it, but no matter how hard I try, my enthusiasm never comes close to everyone else’s.

Take the touch screen, arguably the iPhone’s defining feature. It can make navigating web pages incredibly easy, but I often find myself inadvertently clicking on links when I mean to be scrolling. Basically, every time I touch the iPhone, it does something bizarre and unexpected because I touched something I wasn’t supposed to. The extra real estate the touch screen enables is also great, but it comes at the expense of my favorite feature- a real keyboard. When I try to use the iPhone’s keyboard, I feel like a 4 year old learning how to write his name. For instance, every time my girlfriend and I get lost when she is driving, she tosses me her iPhone so I can navigate with Google Maps and the built-in GPS. But the slightest bump in the road sends my index finger off course, and makes actual typing impossible. It’s been said a million times before, but developing opposable thumbs was an important step in human evolution that helped separate us from most of the animal kingdom by allowing us to develop tools (like the iPhone). The iPhone’s tiny, unresponsive keyboard renders my thumbs useless, which I believe is an affront to our species.

Google Maps on the New iPhone

I could go on about the smudgy, glare reflecting screen, the unreliability and fragility (2 co-workers had theirs break over the weekend, one of whom is now on his 4^th iPhone) and the cost. But perhaps my biggest obstacle to the iPhone is mental. The very fact that everyone seems to love the iPhone automatically makes me suspicious. The weekend that Kangaroo Jack was #1 at the box office, I made a vow to myself never to buy something just because everyone else has. When I list off my complaints to iPhone users, they get defensive and talk about how much it changed their lives. They show me their latest app that they will use for 2 days then forget about, and tell me I will get used to the phone’s quirks and the touch-screen keyboard. But here’s, the thing- I don’t want to get used to it. I shouldn’t have to! People say the same thing about moving to Phoenix, but that doesn’t change the fact that humans were not meant to live in 125 degree heat.

So where does this leave me? I am not totally committed to a particular phone right now, and based on the iPhone’s capabilities, it is the clear leader in the smartphone market. It is just being able to leverage those capabilities that I have a problem with. Apple could announce a new iPhone today that has a more tactile keyboard, a less finicky touch screen, longer battery life, and doesn’t break when you sneeze on it, and I would be sold. This seems unlikely, but a boy can dream.

On the other hand, I can hope the Blackberry browser has improved since the original 8300 release, and just stick with what I know. Like I said, the basic functionality is there, but anything beyond making a phone call or sending SMS or email is so primitive it might as well not exist. I have yet to fully investigate the Bold, but I am hoping this is the device for me.

Finally, I could just do some research and look for a phone from another manufacturer. I am sure there are great smartphones out there from Samsung, LG and others. But despite what this blog might indicate, I am not sure I actually want to do the research to find the perfect phone for me. While I like gadgets, I get overwhelmed by too many choices, and the smartphone market seems chalk full of options.

So, unless Apple completely wows me today, and RIM continues to ignore its most obvious and easy-to-fix short comings, I will most likely remain a Blackberry man.

A newsletter from Strand Consult, an independent Danish consulting firm has stuck its neck out and claims the iPhone is an operator’s worst friend. It’s an interesting claim which is well worth reading though I sense the tall poppy syndrome is being invoked here or Jante Law as it is known in Denmark.

Strand Consult’s report does go against the grain. Yes, Apple have a unique marketing and PR machine that is the envy of many companies but this machine does stand on great products, which is maybe why Apple can do no-wrong in many people’s eyes.

As someone who only had a basic mobile phone calling plan for years, I watched my AT&T bill grow dramatically when I signed up for the iPhone but it has been worth it. I email, text, watch videos, share photos and I can’t wait for the day when I’ll be able to make mobile video calls on a smartphone.

The iPhone market share is growing and last quarter it had over 12 percent of the smartphone market – impressive after less than 18 months of sales. The iPhone has also driven all smartphone manufacturers to offer better phones to end users and there are some great offerings out on the market now.

When Sony Walkman dropped the ball, Apple picked it up with the iPod launch. Now the iPod is a mainstream product recognizable everywhere. So, if the iPhone and other smartphones can do for mobile operators what iPod and iTunes currently do for music sales, operators won’t have to bury their head in the sand. Operators could look forward to offering users more features such as real-time video and increase their revenues.

Today, Portio Research announced the publication of their Worldwide Mobile Forecast report. The report projects 5.5 billion mobile subscribers by 2013, up from just over 3 billion at the end of 2007. While the report does not specifically mention mobile VoIP and video services, it does cover the growth of next generation networks such as 3G. The news should be considered positive by anyone interested in the possibilities that mobility brings to advanced voice and video communications. 

We are all familiar with the explosive growth of the mobile handset market and the technological innovations it has brought about in the last 10 years or so. However, as emerging economies such as India and China continue to grow, the market for mobile devices and services is expected to grow even more rapidly. This means that as networks evolve and handsets,such as smartphones or dualmode phones, with advanced capabilities become more available, cutting-edge features such as VoIP and real-time video are sure to follow. While these features present a unique set of technical challenges, and there may be some initial resistance from network operators, the end result will eventually be an enhanced end-user experience that encourages better communication and connects us all. We look forward to seeing how these developments shake out and how GIPS can aide the market by solving some of the most difficult problems associated with real-time voice and video communications.