Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Talkonaut for Symbian S60, pre-release.

For the last few months we have been working hard on preparing for release of our new and native Talkonaut mobile software for Symbian S60 platform. Although we devoted a lot of time tesing it extensively, there is always a room for a bug. So we thought that you might be interested in helping us with testing process. You may download a pre-release version of new Talkonaut from http://www.gtalk2voip.com/~rz/talkonaut-s60-3rd.SIS. We expect to hear constructive feedbacks from you, so if you are not ready for "undesirable" features, you better not try it at all :).

Meanwhile, I managed to arrange some time to write a small essay regarding our mobile voip development process and all the experience we got. Here is an excerp:

Since the very start of GTalk2VoIP project early in 2006 we at GTalk2VoIP TEAM had been nursing the idea of creating something very Google Talk like for mobile phones which could be used to make voice calls over GPRS (and WIFI) as simple as it is made in Google Talk: you see a contact of your friend, if he/she is present, you press Call button and you talk. So easy and so powerful, isn’t it ? On the opposite, the mainstream consumer VoIP software (so called soft-phones) was and still is very unfriendly: simply downloading a SIP phone onto your PC won’t make you able to make calls over the internet instantly, you will need to obtain a SIP account, configure it into your soft-phone, define a dozen of other settings like STUN server, dialing schemes depending on your SIP provider, etc, and only after that, if you were lucky enough, you will be able to add your friend’s SIP URI into list of contacts, then call. Of course being able to manage as many settings is very positive feature for a power user, but for an average this kind of mainstream VoIP is very frightening and totally unacceptable. Sure, there are some projects like Gizmo Project (now Gizmo5) which are desperately trying to make things better, but still…

So at that time early in spring of 2006 we came to a thought -- we want all that Google Talk style VoIP on our brand new mobile phones, with all the power of presence and Jabber based IM chat, we want it to be able to run through dominating GPRS/EDGE service of GSM networks as well as through WIFI hotspots, we want it to be easily and automatically switching between available hotspots like any GSM phone switches between towers, we wish it had a Google Talk like user interface. Why ? Because it’s clean, neat and intuitive, there’s nothing obsolete in its design like innumerous features of Yahoo! Messenger, nothing irritating and slowing down like in Live Messenger, and it is not using stone-age protocol like AIM. But most of all we want it to be completely based on open standards...



Everyone is welcome to read the full text from http://www.gtalk2voip.com/why-i-hate-mobile-industry.html. Please, let me know what you think on the subject.

Regards,
Ruslan.