Om Malik says: “some of [Nokia's] new handsets, such as the new N78, are not VoIP compatible anymore.” Charlie Schick of Nokia Conversations says the report of the death of VoIP has been groosly exaggerated.

While I haven’t seen the N78 or the N96 up close and personal for more than a minute or two, I’m not surprised that the “upgrade” to S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 “broke” some stuff, or that the VoIP client was “left out” of the phone. Based on past experience with feature pack upgrades, that’s not unusual. (Why does the E71 still have it’s VoIP client, Om? It’s because the E71 is an FP1 device.)

Removing the SIP stack doesn’t make sense. Heck, the carriers themselves use it in some capacities. They may not want you making VoIP calls, but any carrier that implements Kodiak Networks Push-to-Talk service uses–you guessed it–SIP. This includes companies like AT&T, MetroPCS, Telstra, and others.

So TruPhone and the other software vendors that use Nokia’s SIP stack will have to do a little bit of work to get their excellent VoIP over WiFi software working on the newer handsets. It’s par for the course, particularly with feature pack upgrades. Om will get his VoIP and life will go on.

All this crap about using VoIP on planes, blocking the traffic, working around it, and more blocking is just plane silly. While I don’t doubt that phone calls on planes will be annoying, let’s look at other sources of noise that are annoying:

• Your neighbor(s) talking amongst themselves, or to you when you don’t want to talk
• Someone a few rows away brought a screaming child on the plane
• The noise from the engines

How about we ban these things while we’re at it? No? Why single out phone calls, then?

I think the flight attendants should offer free ear plugs to passengers who are affected by noise, or better yet, if you’re annoyed, plug yourself into a portable media device. Hard to be annoyed at things you can’t hear.

photo credit: trochim

Jaiku, Google’s social networking service it acquired last year, has been completely offline since Friday sometime. The rumor is that they will be completely on the Google App Engine after this “upgrade,” though the Google folks haven’t commented on this.

What have my followers been doing without Jaiku? Some of set up camp on Twitter, others are trying the latest upstart, Rejaw (which has a nice web interface), and some are subscribing to my FriendFeed. I don’t feel a huge loss, though I miss the rantings of certain people.

Will Jaiku come back? More importantly, will the community that was there come back when it it does? Only time will tell.

Me? I don’t care.

Famed Science Fiction author Ray Bradbury recently celebrated his 88th Birthday. Perhaps one of my favorite short stories that he wrote was A Sound Of Thunder, which discusses the dangers of time travel.

Meanwhile, Ray Bradbury gave a talk to a bunch of students at Point Loma Nazarene University’s Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea in 2001. He gave some interesting advise to would-be writers, which I will take the liberty of quoting and paraphrasing here. Even so, watch the whole video, it’s well worth it!

Write Often: In the context of writing a novel, Bradbury says that writing a novel might not be the best thing to do as a beginning writer. Writing short stories is much easier. The quality doesn’t matter, but the practice does. And you wonder why I write so many blog posts? If I write several a day for a year, they can’t all suck.

Read Other Works: Bradbury lists several authors–some in print, some not–that are required reading for writing short stories. In addition, he suggests reading poetry and essays in a variety of fields–especially ones outside your own field of interest! Do it nightly. You will get ideas and metaphors that you can use in your own writing.

Enjoy Your Writing: Bradbury says “Writing is not a serious business, it’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it. [...] If it’s work, stop it and do something else!” I couldn’t agree more, having hit that proverbial wall in the middle of writing my second book, not to mention more recently in my blogging for various other places. It stopped being fun and became work. Both my writing and quality of life suffered.

How To Cure The Proverbial Writers Block: Bradbury says “it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing. [...] [Stop] whatever you’re writing and do something else.” I can tell you from my own experience that my best writing simply flows from my fingertips without much thought. When you’re writing the right thing, there is no writers block.

Don’t Go Into Writing For The Money: Sometimes you get paid to write things you don’t want to write. If you don’t enjoy it, the writing won’t be as good and might compromise your reputation as a writer.

Write Your Passion: In his talk, Bradbury talks about writing about what you hate and fear most. He also talks about writing about things you feel passionate about. Both hate and fear involve passion, and passion makes for some great writing. It’s also much easier to write, speaking from experience.

Surprise Yourself: This is one of the biggest surprises of this lecture. Here we have one of the greatest science fiction writers in literature saying outright that when he wrote several of his first books, he had no idea where they were going to end up. In fact, The Martian Chronicles several short stories that Bradbury had written about Mars, woven together. Bradbury followed his writing and passion wherever it took him. His love for a particular painting helped him to meet someone who ended up illustrating many of his books.

I personally don’t understand the fascination with push-to-talk. However, the folks at Palringo, whom put out a multi-service IM client for mobile phones, including the iPhone, now offer push-to-talk on the iPhone. They didn’t offer this functionality when they released the client last month.

The value with Palringo’s service, in theory, is that it is service-agnostic and could be used worldwide instead of being tied to a carrier. Now, iPhone users can join in on the fun. It’s not a kind of “fun” I get. Maybe someone can explain it to me?

Fonolo, the company that allows you to cut through the interactive voice respones mazes companies put up, has exposed this “deep dialing” functionality in an API. The API allows you to:

• Search Fonolo’s directory of companies;
• Display the full text of the phone menu for a selected company;
• Initiate a Deep Dial process to any node in the phone menu;

I don’t get it. I can see how cool Fonolo’s technology is and I can see why making it available to others might be a good thing. But I’m trying to figure out how this would fit into another application. Not at the nuts and bolts level, but at the 50,000 foot level. Maybe I’m lacking imagination here.

One other thing that Fonolo did that I can see the value of immediately–at least for Fonolo–is the ability to route “deep dialed” calls to an arbitrary SIP address. This presents a cost savings for Fonolo and for the end user, a bit more flexibility about where deep dialed calls go.

Andy made a big splash on Twitter (and throughout the blogosphere) when he announced that he had a call on an airplane thanks to Phweet. I, of course, don’t deny it happened, but I want to warn everyone that this could easily be blocked in the future.

This probably won’t make a lot of sense without knowing what Aircell and Phweet are. Aircell is American Airlines new WiFi in the sky service that recently launched. The reported restrictions on this service are that VoIP applications are disallowed. Skype, interestingly enough, can be used without using the voice calling.

Phweet is Stuart Henshall and David Beckemeyer’s latest brainchild, making it possible for two (or more) people to set up a voice call using only your twitter credentials. No phone numbers needed. One of the ways you can connect into Phweet is through a flash widget provided by TringMe, which uses standard HTTP to communicate.

And therein lies the hole. Unlike with SIP-based solutions like SightSpeed, which reportedly failed after about 10 seconds, TringMe’s widget was able to bust through whatever Aircell is doing to block VoIP calls on the planes. The reason? The traffic looks like normal web traffic.

In some sense, that’s correct. However, if you were to look at that HTTP traffic more closely, you can figure out that something doesn’t look right about that HTTP traffic. An HTTP proxy seems to thwart the TringMe widget. Forcing the traffic through a proxy–or looking for the “signature” of this TringMe widget–is all you need to be able to block thhis flash widget without impacting other widgets (e.g. YouTube, Hulu).

Of course, like porn finds its way around the filters, you can likely find ways around this blockage. That being said, voice traffic has a certain fingerprint that is hard to mask, even if you were to encrypt the traffic. I have no doubt that Aircell, if it so chooses, could make it very difficult for this traffic to get through. I wouldn’t count on this “hole” working for long.

While I was on vacation, I got the news that VoSKY is releasing a 1U box that will interface with the T1/E1 port on a conventional PBX and replace it with Skype. From the press release:

VoSKY’s latest gateway can support up to 30 concurrent Skype calls using E1 ISDN PRI or up to 23 calls with T1 ISDN PRI, providing scalable performance for enterprise applications. Companies can take advantage of Skype’s newly launched Unlimited World plans for ultra low cost international and long distance calls to customers and business partners.  Multiple VoSKY Exchange gateways can also be set up in dispersed office locations to enable free calling between colleagues in different coasts, countries, or continents.

Think of it like an analog telephone adapter to replace your landline. This is basically the same thing, except instead of replacing 1 landline, you’re replacing a one T1 or E1’s worth of them.

This is certainly one way to get Skype into the enterprise without getting people to use headsets on their computers. However, it does nothing to address the mobile side of the equation. Maybe I’m tainted by my experience at Nokia, but I see a marked decrease in desk phones and an increase in mobile-only usage.

A while ago, I posted that Qwest intends on selling Verizon Wireless service instead of operating as an mobile virtual network operator of Sprint. As of yesterday, you can migrate your “Qwest Wireless” service to Verizon–complete with a “get out of contract free” provision.

Really, though, you’re not getting out of a contract entirely. You’ll just be signing a new 2 year agreement with Verizon Wireless, particularly if you want any discounts buying a new handset–which you will need to do. Eventually, you’ll get combined billing and a bundle discount similar to what you get with Qwest Wireless, but today, that’s not entirely the case.

It also sounds like two cool features of the current Qwest Wireless service will be gone: free calls between your landline and home phone as well as “one number” service (one number for both landline and mobile). The push-to-talk service will be gone, but that doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

Of course, this is a non-starter for me, personally: I don’t live in Qwest’s service area and I don’t want wireless service from Verizon Wireless–at least until they drop CDMA and go with a worldwide standard like GSM.

Ted Wallingford did a “smackdown” comparison between the Apple iPhone 3G and the Nokia Nseries devices. His assessment, while the Nokia Nseries has more functionality, the iPhone gets the nod “for those who want a frustration-free, minimal-hack cell phone experience.”

While regular readers know I have a dog in this hunt, and I’ll admit I haven’t spent a lot of time looking the Apple iPhone (i.e. the competition), here’s what I’ve been able to piece together based on my limited use of the device and what research I’ve been able to do.

The Apple iPhone is a media consumption device. Clearly the interface lends itself to easily consuming media, be it music, videos, photos, or web pages. However, as a media generation device, it is not so great. The camera is bad, typing on the iPhone screen has been described as hard by some, and certain classes are third-party apps are simply not available because Apple hasn’t (or won’t) approve them.

The Nokia Nseries are also media consumption devices. They can sync with Windows Media–complete with DRM. They support downloading podcasts direct from the phone using Nokia Podcasting, and some models even support the FM radio. The interface is not as refined as the iPhone, but the basic functionality is there and, in some cases, surpasses the iPhone. Nokia’s Music Store–available in only a few countries–allows purchasing of tracks over the air from the handset.

Unlike the iPhone, though, but many of the Nokia Nseries devices–particularly the newer ones–are media generation devices. The Nokia N95 and N82 can take videos in 640×480 and pictures in 5 megapixel glory. For me, that’s good enough to replace my dedicated video camera and still camera for “everyday” stuff.

I tend to agree with Alec Saunders on Squawkbox, who discussed this topic ad-nauseum on yesterday’s Squawkbox. He said that comparing these two devices was a bit like comparing a hammer and a screwdriver. They are different tools that do different things. Bravo.

Meanwhile, the problem that all of these devices have is quite simple: battery life. (Yes, Sheryl, I noticed the comment you made on yesterday’s Squawkbox). When you bring 3G into the equation, it seems like they both fall flat. Perhaps that’s why the Blackberry has better battery life at the moment–there isn’t a 3G version available (at least in North America)! Wonder how they will compare with 3G.

Edit: If my “dog in this hunt” statement wasn’t obvious before, I work for Nokia. However, my job has nothing to do with mobile phones except as a user and occasional beta tester. This is my own blog and my own opinions.