More on VoIP in Nokia N80

Some months ago I talked about VoIP in Nokia N80, the mobile pet with me for the last eight months.

Yesterday, I read in the RSS feed of Nokia Beta Labs the announcement of a new beta tool: Gizmo for S60.

I was a little bit surprised, because it seemed to be the release 1.21 of that tool, and I remember I had tried a version 3.xx. Some other stuff that confused me in Beta Labs announcement of this tool was the requirement to install Nokia Internet Services Support Package before Gizmo rel. 1.21 (it wasn't needed when using the .sis file downloadable in Gizmo Project official web page).

But they talked about IM messaging and online presence detection and it itched my curiosity. So I had to scratch it :-)

Besides, I had read somewhere that voipcheap.com (the SIP-based VoIP that won my personal contest) needs 80 Kbps while Gizmo (the other contestant) only needs 20 Kbps.

After installing both .sis files, Gizmo integrated itself with the Contacts tool of S60 3rd Edition. A new tab is displayed between Contacts and Groups called... Gizmo :-) There you can go online and all your Gizmo contacts will be displayed, showing their status. You can phone them to mobile phone, to landline phone or to SIP phone, and even chat with them. Great!

The decision I took in the past in favour of vopipcheap.com was based on two features: firstly, the chance to call for free to landlines of several countries worldwide, and transparent integration with S60 3rd Edition VoIP/SIP engine.

Being online in Gizmo and accessing the Internet Phone dialog in S60 3rd Edition OS kept on telling me that I was already connected to Gizmo and then the dialog closed. I do not know if I had tried this when I chose voipcheap (I could swear I did and it did not work but my lack of memory is legendary), but this time I tried to connect using Internet Phone dialog before using the Gizmo interface in contacts and it asked me to go online in voipcheap.com. Nice, this time Gizmo did not overwrite my preference of having the other VoIP service as default.

But the big surprise, after a successful connection to voipcheap.com was Internet Phone asking me to connect to Gizmo too. This is the best configuration, so you can be connected to as many SIP-based VoIP services as you want at the same time using the same OS-integrated interface.

Then I went to Gizmo tab in Contacts and I was online and seing my Gizmo contacts' state.

It was all OK except for:

- I tried to call my wife from my N80 via WiFi to our PC and sound quality was poor. She said she could hear me perfectly but I heard a lot of noise (and we repeted the experience three times). So I still have to check that great performance of Gizmo with such a few bandwidth.

- I tried to call my landline phone and a nice voice told me that I had no call-out credits. Gizmo web site says that you can call other contacts' phones for free (see instructions in their web page). My wife is a contact and our phone is shown in her profile so... I do not understand what happens. voipcheap.com is greater about this. You have a list of countries with free calls (and some of them include mobile phones, not only landlines). I guess it has to see somehow with the fact that I am not an "active user". I will have to check what that is (I thought it was achieved by following the 3 steps in Gizmo web page, but it seems to be bot enough). I will take a deep look on this.