For the astute amoung, yes there is a ‘*’ in that statement. It allows any Gizmo Project member to call any other Gizmo Project member for free. There is nothing new about this, they have this (and I’m a user) forever. The new bit is that they allow you to call other members on any number be it PSTN, Cell, SIP or Gizmo. This is HUGE!

It’s a further sign of the asymptotic decline in per-minute pricing of phone service. Decreasing costs of bandwidth and switching fabric are placing downward pressure on the per-minute model. It’s clear that the market is moving to a flat-rate, all you can eat, model for telephone service.

If I were in a telcom manager I’d be actively investigating commercial VoIP based options. I do continue to harbor concerns about voice quality when calls are carried over a public network (internet) but for intranetwork calls, such as those between branch offices, there is no reason not to leverage existing infrastructure. The network impacts are well understood and manageable and the long term cost savings real.

As I begin planning for an office buildout and move for my day job I can promise you that VoIP will play a prominent role.

Everyone is familiar with the way telephone calls sound.  That particular ‘sound’ is created by significantly limiting the range of frequencies that are carried through the phone network.  A full range of sound, like you might hear from a CD, is approx. 20hz to 20khz.  It’s very likely that the sound system that you are listening to that CD through is not capable of reproducing that entire range, but that’s Ok since only young children can hear it anyway.

Almost every phone call you’ve ever heard narrowed that 20khz range down to only 8khz, less than 1/2 what we normally hear.  The brainiacs over at the open source PBX project FreeSWITCH have created a new codec that doubles that range to 16khz.  The result is a much more natual sounding voice.

FreeSWITCH.org :: Open Source Telephony Project

I think I’m going to start an new catagory, ‘smartphone’. My trusty Audiovox SMT5600 is always by my side. I originally purchased it (used on eBay and unlocked from the tyrany of carrier chains) because it was the first, and only (at the time) phone that played Windows DRM protected content.

I use it on a daily basis to listen to podcasts on my commute. I have a cassette adapter for my truck and then switch to the ‘buds for the train ride. I can burn through a good 2+ hours of content on a daily basis. I’ve up’d the storage card to a 1GB device and although I get the occasional ‘jitter’ in playback it has worked well despite the fact that the specs for the phone indicate a limit of 512MB.

Lately I’ve greatly increased my use of the on-board camera. With the addition of an app from ShoZu I can now directly upload my phonecam shots to my Flickr account immediatly after taking the shot. No need to sync the phone, attach the pic to an email, or other thumb-wrentching exercises, just a simple ‘Yes’ to the ‘Send this to Flickr?’ prompt.

Sweet.

Anyway, what I really wanted to mention was a good description of several of the icons that appear on the status bar of the phone. This entry goes into some detail about the antenna and data connection type icons. I always suspected that the ‘G’ indicated a GSM data connection but now I know for sure.

Windows Mobile Team Blog : What Are These Arrows (and why are they still here)?