Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 18 years 3 months 21 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
Google hardware coming soon? Digitimes Telecom reported over the weekend that:
Alpha Networks of Taiwan is set to release a Wi-Fi phone equipped with Google Talk. You would, of course, be able to have conversations on this phone.
Google Talk, the chat program offered free by Google is gaining in popularity, and will soon be compatible with a handheld device.
In May of this year, this blog reported that the Nokia 770 will support it too, and can supposedly work over bluetooth or wifi.
That’s pretty slick! Here in Oregon, Google has nearly completed a new facility in Hood River… I wonder if they’ll start delivering my water or my electricity next?
yes, this is indeed awesome news, as google talk’s underlying protocol, jingle, is just an extension to the open xmpp protocol, affectionately known as “jabber”.
already, the open source jabber/jingle program, jabbin, available for linux, windows, and mac, allows one to use jingle-based voip on any jabber server, not just google’s (google talk is just google’s own implementation of jabber, thus it is standards based and compatible with any other open jabber servers out there).
what we have here, then, is (finally!) a bonafide potential replacement for the pstn. SIP (session initiation protocol), for all its merits, is known of as having firewall problems that non-technical people often don’t have the patience to figure out how to fix. skype has been popular, but is proprietary; certainly not a realistic long-term standards-based solution to pervasive decentralized voip.
what jingle offers is the existing support and infrastructure of jabber, along with a big brand name (google), and a simpler (relative to SIP) xml-based spec, as well as good firewall tolerance.
my prediction? SIP and other protocols will go mostly by the wayside within this decade, at the hands of jingle.