I’ve been waiting impatiently to write something about Apple’s iPhone on this blog, but alas Apple chose not to include VoIP functionality on the device (among many other things; the phone is seriously lacking in the feature department) so the iPhone remained irrelevant to this blog.

To a certain extent it still does. Yes, the device is beautiful and it probably has the first ever operating sytem done right on a mobile phone. Don’t get me started about Symbian, Windows Mobile or Linux for that matter. But I digress.

It seems that the fine people at Truphone, who until now have mainly been leveraging Nokia’s SIP stack on its E-Series devices - aside from bugging an incumbent once in a while :) - have created a VoIP application for Apple’s shiny new phone. Needless to say the software is still in a very early phase (there’s no GUI), but Truphone expects a reliable beta in a month.

This is great news both for consumers, who besides unlocking their phone soon will have a new option to pay less for phone calls; and businesses, since many already rely on VoIP within the company but now have little choice except for the Nokia E-Series or select Blackberry devices. Of course, the latter will depend on whether Truphone will release the source code to the software to allow people to use it with other services, which is quite unlikely.

Anyway, as was the case with the unlocking applications, it’s quite likely free versions of VoIP apps will become available soon after the release of the for-profit ones. All-in-all it remains a truly remarkable achievement for a phone which officially doesn’t even allow developers to write software for it, let alone provides an SDK.

Read the full article here, or register your interest with Truphone here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 18:29 CEST and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.