Android non supporterà Bluetooth, Nokia toglie lo stack SIP dalla serie N: cosa c’è dietro?

This week’s news gives a strong sense that the alternative voice wolf is howling at the door; everyone was surprised that Android 0.9 was missing Bluetooth support, but far more significantly, Google has quietly removed the GTalkService API from the current build. Why significant? Google Talk uses the XMPP protocol, familiar to Telco 2.0 readers from MXit and Jabber, for both messaging and voice. And some of the SIP phone people — Fring and Gizmo come to mind — offer interworking between GTalk and other XMPP networks and their SIP-based phone service. So you get your SIP ID for free, and SIP service free, buy a phone number and PSTN peering for cheap, and set it up to forward everything to GTalk; then you whip up something to wrap the Android GTalk API, get a cheap data plan, and you’re doing Voice & Messaging 2.0 service all by yourself. You can see why carriers wouldn’t like this at all.

And you have to wonder if there’s any connection with their big deal to make Google the default search engine for all things Verizon. Still, always worth keeping in mind Intel founder Andy Grove’s famous quote: A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

As if by magic, Nokia has quietly disappeared the SIP stack from its latest N-series gadgets, thus breaking at least three mobile-VoIP services. [Ed – Oops! We got one wrong here. See at end. ] You have to assume that N95 buyers tend to be power users and therefore more likely than average to use them; is Nokia being pressurised by operators? However, this is rather ambiguous:

A Nokia VoIP client is not included with the Nokia N78 and the Nokia N96 and VoIP solutions based on this particular client such as Gizmo will not work. However, Forum Nokia will cooperate with third-party developers to support them in porting their applications from S60 3.0/3.1 releases to S60 3.2. One example is Fring, whose popular application will be offered via Nokia’s Download! service for the Nokia N96.

So you can’t have SIP, except when you can. That’s almost as conflicted as…a telco! Meanwhile, Mobilkom Austria launches a new SIP-based VoIP client. And telco PR guru Andy Abramson is using Boingo’s WLAN roaming with Truphone’s mobile VoIP on his E71. Apparently the E-series gadgets get to keep their SIP stacks so those fancy corporate unicomms systems don’t die. Goodbye, mobility price premium (yes, even at 35,000 feet).
[via Telco 2.0]

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