Is Nokia bowing to carrier pressure? VoIP removed from new phones
Nokia has been impressing me lately with lots of new phones and a push into the enterprise market. They have always been putting innovative features on their phones and it’s no surprise they are selling handsets like hotcakes. I must admit I was surprised to find out something recently that flies in the face of that innovation. Nokia sells their high-end handsets unlocked for the most part which means they can put anything on the phones they want without worry that they will rile the big bad carrier. They jumped on the VoIP bandwagon early on with the ability to provide these types of functions even though carriers hate VoIP. It makes sense as phones with VoIP capability can be used to make free calls, something road warriors really love to avoid roaming charges.
Om Malik got a reader tip that the newest Nokia handsets have removed the ability of the phones to do VoIP. This was done quietly and I had not heard this anywhere. It surprised Om too so he pulled out some phones and sure enough the newer handsets don’t support VoIP. He turned to Nokia for an explanation and got this which pretty much confirms it:
Nokia Nseries is committed VoIP services as part of its
offering. That is why we have included SIP stack and improved the
developer VoIP offering in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 by enhancing
the VoIP APIs to improve the call quality, as an example.A Nokia VoIP client is not included with the Nokia N78 and the Nokia
N96 and VoIP solutions based on this particular client such as Gizmo
will not work. However, Forum Nokia will cooperate with third-party
developers to support them in porting their applications from S60
3.0/3.1 releases to S60 3.2. One example is Fring, whose popular
application will be offered via Nokia’s Download! service for the Nokia
N96.
It would seem to me that Nokia is bowing to some pressure from the carriers as there is seldom a reason to remove abilities that you already have. This probably won’t surprise many but it caught me unawares as I thought Nokia was above carrier pressure.
