And once again a tiny thing was blown way out of proportion by the blogospere…

See this post on Nokia’s Conversations blog for some REAL info:
http://conversations.nokia.com/home/2008/08/the-report-of-t.html

Nokia removed their built-in ability to use VoIP, which does affect those apps that rely on it, but they clearly stated third-party solutions will be offered. Fring is cited as an example of something they plan on offering from their download store. Truphone has stated they are going forward with their own solution. Obviously, these guys think they can get VoIP on Nokia phones even without the built-in support.

Also, I think they needed built-in support in the first place because Symbian wasn’t open. Don’t need built-in support to run VoIP on Linux systems. Now that Nokia has opened Symbian 9.5 (which ironically boasts improved VoIP), I would think the built-in support would no longer be needed.

Sumocat, what Nokia has removed is the ability to use these services, third party included. TruPhone and Gizmo Project have always worked but have now been disabled. Nokia has disabled the ability to use VoIP. That’s pretty significant.

Why the assumption it was carrier pressure? Seems to me the VoIP providers have the most to gain out of this deal since they no longer need to compete with a pre-installed VoIP app. Also, by making VoIP third-party only, Nokia sheds some of its workload. Having their own VoIP system seems pretty unnecessary (and not cost-effective) given the other offerings out there.

I thought Nokia’s statement was a bit hard to fathom. They don’t really explain why the feature is not present in their 3.1 version though do they.

Here in the UK my carrier (3) includes skype on all their phones and allows free skype to skype calls on their network. It’s quite a cool feature really.

Other than Skype and Fring, I wonder if many people are using the SIP features in N-series phones.