Last night, reader Jim Rob Jones emailed to express his displeasure over my switch to the BlackBerry, calling us “irrelevant” because I am not carrying an iPhone. Well, Jim, since I’m not willing to put up with the poor 3G connections from AT&T, I carry an iPod Touch, which does pretty much the same job and allows me to write about iPhone Platform apps. Of course, it does prevent me from yelling at my iPhone, but my doctor thinks that is a good thing. With Wi-Fi and a growing number of VoIP apps such as Skype, Nimbuzz and Truphone, I can also use it to make outbound calls. Today Vopium,a low-cost VoIP service provider, jumped in the fray and released an iPhone app. The company will add iPod Touch support for its service in a couple of weeks. I will check it out then. Meanwhile, if you have an iPhone, you can sign up for their service today, and get 30 minutes of free calls and 30 text messages (SMS). Vopium also works on other handsets, such as BlackBerry and Symbian-based phones.
Hopefully iPhone 3.0 will allow background tasks which would enable everyday usability for these VoIP apps that iPhone offers. The fact that these apps only work in the foreground still has me turning to my PC for VoIP calls. I thought things would change with the introduction of Skype to iPhone. Yet my use of it so far has mostly remained a phone book since it has launched. (Last I tried, the bluetooth headset doesn’t even work with Skype iPhone calls). What will be most interesting and exciting is if iPhone 3.0 has the forward facing camera. Then we would have a real and practical video phone network here in the US.
- Jason Nadaf
You can try FonoSIP.com ipod touch sip softphone right now. It was released a few months ago.
http://www.fonosip.com/english/mobile.html
i felt the same way about “background task” when i was listening to yahoo launch cast radio and wanted to check news feeds … felt pretty absurd. i wonder y apple limited iphone capabilities in certain aspect .. is it because they would do those in the upgraded version and make early adopter switch to the new one and also part with some hard cash?
I would imagine that whatever the logic was, the logic was similar for the iPhone having a lame 2.0 megapixel camera and small 8gb/16gb hard drive. I am sure Om would have better insight into this.