Tesco adds more VoIP to the supermarket shelves

We have previously discussed Tesco offering VoIP to the consumer – see our post here, well we see that Tesco are also offering a cheap VoIP service using WiFi on Nokia handsets. The offering makes use of a service by Australian company Freshtel, and requires an application download for the Nokia phone.

The service is currently only available for a limited number of handsets, all of which are Series 60 WiFi enabled Nokias – the E51, E65, E81 and N95. However, more handset support is slated to be available soon.

This move may not be significant for the VoIP business marketplace but when a big player like Tesco offers VoIP then it helps the acceptance of the technology in the overall marketplace.

Visit the Tesco Talkwifi website here.

Snom Collaborate with Fonality

With Asterisk based products one of the big objections to deploying them is compatibility with software and hardware, there is such a wide range of products in the market place that often it is the customer who suffers the pain while ‘glitches’ are sorted out.

Fonality has added a new partner to its “ecosystem” this week, as Snom Technologies announced it would be a third-party partner for deployments of Fonality IP PBX systems. Snom makes VoIP phones, such as the 3xx series and M3 IP Dect, for the SME market, which Fonality is strong in.

Fonality’s FACE program (Fonality Authorized Certified Ecosystem) allows resellers and third party vendors to assure customer confidence and decrease issues like non compliance. These companies also offer increased integration with Fonality’s products, including trixbox CE, trixbox Pro and PBXtra.

So it is good to see a couple of big players in this marketplace working together.

Have a look at the Snom Press Release here.

Google Join the Browser Band

We see that Google have launched the Beta version of their Chrome browser – there has been an awful lot written about it and the impact it may have in the market place. We see many discussions about Google trying to take Microsoft head on.

We like it, in fact we have used it to write this post and it seems a very clean and simple to use product, Google always go for the ‘clean’ uncluttered look with their products. We will use it from now on and it will be interesting to see how it performs when we try to use it for configuration of Telecom and Networking products which all seem to have their own little foibles when it comes to browsers.

Whatever the affect Chrome has in the marketplace we like Opensource products and welcome Google putting it out.

Get yours here

Are Nokia Moving away from Native VoIP ?

We are fans of Nokia and the way they have introduced VoIP support on most of their WiFi enabled handsets but we see various reports that they will no longer offer VoIP capabilities on some of its new handset models, such as the N78. The N series phones previously included a VoIP client that enabled users to access a range of SIP based VoIP services. The move away from a pre loaded VoIP client is a culture change for the company, which has been quite open source and VoIP friendly.

The older N-series phones 80, 81, 82 and 95 all continue to offer VoIP capabilities, according to Nokia’s website.

Some analysts have speculated that the move away from VoIP on new N-Series phones could be a result of carrier influence, with mobile long distance calling revenues getting shredded by VoIP bypass schemes plus in the UK we saw some carriers releasing the current N Series phones with the VoIP section not loaded so users could not use it unless they defaulted their phones and reloaded the software with a generic setting.

We should mention that we understand only the generic VoIP client is removed and not the actual VoIP stack so users should be able to load specific VoIP clients from providers such as Fring, Truphone etc.