Indeed truphone on blackberry is a very exciting product launch and we are excited about this milestone.
One reason is that most people these days see the blackberry as a status symbol of employment in a senior position. The device is almost omnipresent in global cities like New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Bejing and Shanghai. Still it comes with VERY LARGE BILLS (VLB’s) attached. The VLB are a result of our use of the inbuild address book for calls which very well could be done on Skype, or via your landline. But studies show that even in the presence of a landline phone or a computer with Skype installed we tend to use our mobile for convenience. We are addicted to our smartphones – the modern replacement of cigarettes. These days you see more people playing with mobile phones (in particular blackberries and iphones) on the subway, railways into these global cities than inhaling blue smoke. (thanks god)
Why is the truphone blackberry launch so exciting, many analysts will ask , when it does not yet use the full IP communication capability of the Blackberry WiFi chipset to allow end to end mobile IP communication? Yes, you heard it correctly it currently relies on the ((truphone)) Anywhere product specs (also enabled on the Nokia series by truphone (but not yet on the iPhone), meaning it uses for the first leg GSM to connect to the truphone calling servers ((truphone cloud)).
Also many people have enabled pure IP calling with truphone, pure mobile IP to IP calling with your mates, friends and family members makes a lot of sense once they are all on ((truphone)), but in many cases WiFi will not be openly accessible. So even then it is hugely beneficial if one party is on IP and you call him on his truphone number, meaning the leg into the truphone server comes out of your bundles but the termination is provided free of charge by the truphone calling cloud.
A personal anecdote: On a recent trip to Silicon Valley I was stuck at San Francisco Airport. Already on the American Airline flight to Chicago I was unable to access the lounge or Airport WiFi as the cabin shielded the signal. Nevertheless I was able to use my AT&T bundled minutes to call my family via truphone Anywhere back in London, United Kingdom by just using the At&T bundled minutes. The calling leg from the US truphone servers to my home in London was all provided free of charge by truphone. Therefore a telephone call which would have just lasted 4 minutes before my minutes would have been spend lasted 45 minutes.
The essence of the story is that Blackberries like iPhone contracts with huge bundled minutes which are just as good as WiFi. (e.g. in the UK carriers like 3, T-Moile and O2 are fighting over who offers more minutes for 15 Pounds). In my experience 1200 minutes are almost impossible to use up, except if you have truphone Anywhere enabled on your Nokia or blackberry.
Mobile VoIP to IP on truphone is still the most crystal clear connection if the setup is correctly done, but GSM is almost as good as truphone on WiFi, as Om Malik reports in his article at the New York time and his own Blog.
Tags: truphone
