wifitalk.ca

The Globe and Mail is carrying the story that more Canadian wireless spectrum is going to be auctioned off. It will come in two bands. The 700 MHz band is becoming available due to the switch from analogue to digital TV in August 2011, and a second block of spectrum around 2500 MHz will also become available.

As mobile broadband data use demand climbs, the government needs to keep supply of the airwaves up or prices for monthly subscriptions will become capped, or increase in price. Because of the relatively little data use consumed by mobile VOIP, communications over mobile data networks should remain cheap and become cheaper, but VOIP traffic will have to compete for bandwidth with all other data traffic. One other potential issue relates to quality of service (QoS). It is possible that with increased demand and strained capacity, the lack of a bandwidth prioritization standard could leave voice over data communications choppy, laggy, and of poor quality.

TechCrunch is announcing that the official Google branded Google Voice app has been approved on the Apple App Store and we should see it in the next few weeks, pending some updates to enable some iOS4 features.

They claim that there is no official word yet, just rumours that the app has been approved by Apple. This makes sense however, as several other Google Voice apps have been approved recently, with Apple’s revamping of the rules on the App Store.

I wonder how the producers of the other Google Voice apps will fare, as the official Google version is likely to be free…

Fring has just launched a new service called fringOut, which gives users of Fring the ability to call phone numbers worldwide for 1 cent per minute. This seems to be a response to Skype’s SkypeOut service, and Google’s “gmail talk” feature. Currently, the mobile version of fringOut is only available for Nokia, but Android and iOS apps are coming soon.

Fring has generally been quick to respond to feature requests and updates, which is good from a consumer point of view. With the addition of a call out feature, it begs the question of when a fringIn service will launch, allowing users to buy a phone number so they can receive calls through Fring. With call out rates as low as 1¢/min worldwide, and 0.4¢/min in North America, Fring is making a significant play in this area. If call quality is acceptable, and fringIn becomes a reality, a cross-platform app and service such as Fring could become the best way to set up your personal voice communication network.

fringOut low-cost international calls to any phone number
You can make ‘almost-free’ mobile calls to family and friends not yet on fring to ANY phone. Call more than 200 countries from 1c/min
- Canada from 0.4 cents
- UK from 0.6 cents
- India from 1.1 cents

Sean Kovacs has tweeted that GV Mobile+ has been approved (or at least that’s what I gather from it). That’s two today!

Update: (taken from seankovacs’ blog)

After a long year and a half of being home sick, GV Mobile (+) makes an epic return to the App Store. The app is still propagating to all the servers, so it may take a bit before it shows up. Here is the direct link: GV Mobile +. I’ll be blowing away some promo codes via Twitter (@seankovacs) once I get them AND if #gvmobile trends on Twitter, I’ll set that bad boy to free for the night.

Update: GV Mobile+ is up now too.

The first Google Voice app has hit the app store, and it’s called GV Connect. Providing a front end to the Google Voice service, GV Connect allows users of devices running Apple iOS platform to have a native app with which to interact with Google Voice.

As you may know, one famous Google Voice app, GV Mobile, was approved, de-approved, and removed from the App Store several months ago as part of Apple’s cryptic and inconsistent app approval process. A recent re-think of this policy has seen Apple come around on this issue, and the developer of GV Mobile, Sean Kovacs, has said that Apple is now interested in re-examining his app (to be called GV Mobile+).

However, another app has hit the App Store first, and it is GV Connect. We’ll see how quickly they come now, and it will be interesting to see if Google comes out with their own native Google Voice app (one had apparently been developed and submitted to Apple months ago).

Be sure to check out the GV Mobile+ screenshots to compare the two apps.

Sean has posted some screenshots of GV Mobile+ on his iPhone. He just submitted the app to Apple for review, so hopefully we’ll have a Google Voice app on the iOS platform in a few days.

Just to recap for those not up to date, Sean Kovacs is a part-time app developer who wrote an app called GV Mobile for the iPhone. It was approved by Apple, bought by users of the service, and then was mysteriously removed from the App Store for “replicating iPhone functionality”. Sean then deleted GV Mobile from the App Store, and sold it on the jailbroken app store, Cydia.

Apple recently revised the App Store guidelines, and it appears as though GV Mobile will be allowed back in. Because Sean deleted the app from the Apple database, he has to submit it as a new app, hence the slight name change to GV Mobile+.

Sean just posted some pictures of the app in action:

Apple has updated its app approval guidelines, much to the relief of many a disgruntled developer. This has allowed GV Mobile to be re-submitted and will likely see the return of the app to the iPhone.

Very briefly, Apple’s app approval guidelines were not transparent, were quite arbitrary, and seemed to not be applied consistently. This made many developers frustrated when their apps were rejected from the app store. One of the most relevant apps that I have been following is GV Mobile by Sean Kovacs.

GV Mobile was an app for the iPhone which was a nice front-end to Google Voice. It was approved by Apple, went on sale for a short time (I bought it), and allowed a user to dial phone numbers, listen to voicemails, and access all of Google Voice’s functionality. Unfortunately, at some point it was disapproved of by Apple and was removed from the App store, on the basis that it replicated functionality of the iPhone (namely the dialer).

This was odd as there were many other apps on the App store which had dialers and “replicated functionality” yet were allowed to remain. Speculation was that it was more of an attack on Google Voice than on apps with dialers.

The fallout of this was when users restored their devices, or bought a new one, they could not get access to another copy of GV Mobile, despite having paid for it. This was not the developer’s fault (he subsequently released the app on Cydia, the app store for jailbroken iPhones), and left many users with nothing to show for their money.

Another consequence of this was push notifications never came to GV Mobile, even for those users who never deleted the app. No official app status means no use of Apple’s push notification servers. This means you could get a voicemail or text but not know about it until you manually checked the app.

All of this is now water under the bridge as Sean has gotten confirmation that GV Mobile can be resubmitted to the App store and will likely see it get approved.

Good news: I did get confirmation back from Apple that it will most likely get back in once I resubmit.

Google has announced that 10 million gmail voice calls have been made to date, and they are offering up some tips for how to make better use of the system. The features they are highlighting are:

1. Call Screening – Caller is sent to voicemail and you can listen in.
2. Switching Calls – Receive a call in gmail, transfer it to your cell
3. Call Recording – Self-explanatory
4. Click-to-Dial Chrome Extension – A new extension for Chrome allows you to click on any phone number in a webpage and use gmail to call it.

Everyone else has already covered the Apple music event, but I thought I’d pull out a little tidbit of information that looks promising for VOIP communication. The new iPod touch looks like it’s got everything needed in order to be a fully stand-alone wifi-only VOIP phone without resorting to jailbreaking.

With home wifi networks being common, the iPod touch could be used as an iPhoneHome.

When the 1st generation touch came out, it lacked any sort of microphone input, there was no external speaker, skype wasn’t available, and there was no such thing as backgrounding an application. This meant that you couldn’t talk to the other person, and your iPod wouldn’t let you know when someone was calling.

The second generation touch offered a mic-in by way of the headphone jack, came with an external speaker, and skype was available at the time too. There was still no non-jailbroken way to get apps to run in the background, but push notifications came around to let inactive apps know that someone was trying to connect. In my experience the push notifications came way too late, and the other person had already hung up. I could always call them back within a few minutes, but that’s not quite acceptable for every day use.

With the 3rd generation and iOS4, we finally got backgrounding. Your VOIP app could sit in the background and let you know instantly that someone was trying to call, just as a regular phone would. Furthermore, iOS4 allowed the wifi to remain connected, even when the device was asleep, which would ensure that your incoming calls got through.

Now, with the 4th generation iPod touch, we finally have an external mic to go along with the external speaker thanks to facetime. So long as you have a wifi connection, you should be able to install a good VOIP client and have your new iPod touch run transparently as a phone. This is a great option for people who live in cities with free public wifi, students who spend most of their time on campus, or for people who want a home-only iPhone.

Of course with other apps, you can use the touch as a remote to control your HTPC through something like Apple’s Remote app, or the new and amazing plex media center app. I could easily see someone spending a few hundred dollars on a single device which can sit in their house, act as their phone, universal remote, music player, and hand-held game system. iPhoneHome indeed.

The @googlevoice twitter has announced that the gmail voice plugin was used to make over 1 million voice calls in its first 24 hours. And this wasn’t even a feature that all gmail users could use. W0w.