In a shocking move yesterday AT&T announced that it will now allow Apple to approve iPhone VoiP applications to work over 3G. Until now all the apps were limited to Wi-Fi. Apple & Skype immediately responded that they were happy with the announcement and Skype would work over 3G soon!
Now this just makes me go back to when we found out that RIM developed their own Skype client and killed it because it would cut into carriers voice business. They even crippled their own Mobile Voice System to not work over VoiP for that same reason. Now that one of their biggest partners AT&T is cool with it will we finally see it released? I doubt it but one can always hope.
Still when the Skype client for BlackBerry was first released we were unimpressed since it did not do true VoiP. Maybe now Skype will change and update their BlackBerry app too? I know that Agito managed to figure out how to make VoiP calls on a BlackBerry. Maybe somebody else can do the same?
I know one of the major hurdles for VoiP applications is that it is practically impossible to support “full duplex” on a BlackBerry. Full duplex means recording and playing audio simultaneously. There are quite a few hacks in this regard but RIM is not offering much help in terms of code samples and not supporting JSR 180. The most I have ever read from RIM was this short paragraph from Mark Sohm on the developer forums.
The behavior you see here can vary based on the BlackBerry smartphone model due to the fact that it is primarily based on the underlying hardware of the BlackBerry smartphone. Simultaneous playback and recording is possible on some models, however only one codec can be used at the same time. This means that you’d need to record and play back audio using the same format.
You can try and read up on the subject using this forum search but if anybody has found a solid solution let me know!
