Rise of the Smartphone and What It Means for Fast VoIP

Few industries have witnessed such a massive shakeup in such a short period of time as the mobile industry. One moment everyone was happy with normal phones with text based interfaces and suddenly the iPhone exploded onto the market and opened the floodgates for an entirely new mobile experience. It wasn't as if there were no smartphones before the iPhone. Palm, O2, and the rest certainly had a huge presence and the Microsoft operating system was being used on quite a few of them. But the OS was essentially a miniature version of the desktop system with a "start" menu and many of the same paradigms.

iOS not only designed the mobile experience from the ground up, it was just so beautiful. It introduced the idea of using your fingers instead of a stylus, implemented swipe features, pinch and zoom and generally showed us what a smartphone could be like. And then there was no going back. Android came along and things would never be the same again.

Over the past few years, people have discovered the utility of smartphones and are beginning to use them in ways never before imagined. Games are being designed with astounding graphics and applications such as Fring and Skype are now nothing unusual. We've all begun to think big. And this is what mobile VoIP has been waiting for all this while.

Mobile VoIP is a concept that people need to get used to in order for it to take off. Like the smartphone, the possibility was always there, but no one came forward and made it into a package which everyone could accept. As of now, there's no standardized way for current VoIP applications to interconnect without collaboration. So if you're using Skype, you can't make free Internet calls to another service which doesn't have a Skype login feature. Without standardization, any new technology will fail.

Luckily everyone in the VoIP world seems to have more or less settled on SIP as the protocol they want to follow. Even companies such as Google who are using Jingle have ensured that it's interoperable with SIP. Hopefully this will lead us into an era when anyone who uses VoIP will be able to talk to each other and slowly we can begin to phase out the PSTN system. Anyone with an SIP address will the able to communicate with each other just like email is today.

Mobile VoIP apps are part and parcel of this and are in fact, the last piece of the puzzle of enterprise VoIP. Contact your ITSP today to find out how you can get started with a hosted PBX VoIP system.