VoIP on iPhone not home yet (leave a message)

Support for Voice over IP on the iPhone is one of those features people have been discussing since the iPhone’s announcement at Macworld 2007. Heck, I said as much in an interview at the time. While an official client will likely still have to wait until the App Store goes live in June, that hasn’t stopped programmers from creating VoIP clients that run on jailbroken iPhones.

Fring is one of the first native VoIP clients for the iPhone, boasting integration with popular VoIP and IM networks like Skype, MSN Messenger, GTalk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger. While the application looks pretty smooth, and it’s easy enough to install, provided that you’ve already jailbroken your phone or are willing to do so, it’s still got more than its fair share of hitches, top among them little matters like performance and reliability.

MacUser contributor Cyrus Farivar gave me a call from his Fring-equipped iPhone this morning to test the program out. How does it fare in a real world environment? For my part, it was a lot like talking to astronauts on the space station: I would hear Cyrus coming through fine, but when I spoke to him, there were several seconds of delay before he would respond. On Cyrus’s end, it was even worse: he only got about half of what I was saying, and the sound was exceedingly choppy. Suffice to say that it wasn’t really feasible to have a normal conversation.

I gave the program a shop later, trying out the much-ballyhooed Skype support. While the program was able to retrieve my buddy list with no problem, attempts to dial out to landline numbers proved fruitless. I thought I heard ringing once, but I never got the other side to pick up. I wasn’t able to test it out with another Skype buddy, however, so that may prove somewhat better.

Since the program runs on the iPod touch as well, some are pointing to it as a way to turn your touch into an iPhone (you’ll need a microphone that plugs into the dock-connector port, however). I’d say that it’s not there yet, but there’s potential down the road. At the moment, however, iPhone users will get far better performance and reliability from sticking with AT&T (or your—ahem—other cell provider).

Category: Software

Posted by Dan Moren on Apr 15 2008, 3:54 PM ET

• © 2007 Mac Publishing, LLC.
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service
• Community Standards