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Covers the latest news, insight, analysis, blogs and product reviews of unified communications equipment and software. Topics include transmission of voice communications over a wired or wireless network using technologies such as VoIP, IP Telephony, IP PBX, press-to-talk and computer-based voice.
Top VOIP & Telephony News
Beginning Nov. 9, sales associates for Best Buy Mobile will install Google Mobile App on all BlackBerry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, or Nokia S60 smartphones through the Walk Out Working program, a free in-store smartphone setup. The deal makes Best Buy the first retailer in the U.S. to distribute Google Mobile App on smartphones sold in store. However, Best Buy won't install Google Mobile App on the Motorola Droid or HTC Eris because it isn't available on Android. Google Mobile App support is missing in action on the iPhone, too.
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eBay settles lawsuits with Joltid and Joost in a $1.9 billion deal that gives Skype ownership over all software previously licensed from Joltid and paves the way for a group of investors to acquire the majority of the company. Joltid and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who had earlier tried to buy Skype back from eBay, will join the investor group, contributing Joltid software and making a capital investment in exchange for a 14 percent stake in Skype. Silver Lake and fellow investors Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board will grab 56 percent of Skype, with eBay retaining the remaining 30 percent.
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News Analysis: Apple, Google, RIM and the other major vendors might be enjoying the fruits of the touch-screen business, but there are some aspects of those products that they don't like to talk about. Here are 10 reasons why there is still plenty of room for improvement in mobile phone design, service and performance.
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Verizon Wireless stores are opening as early as 7 a.m. local time Nov. 6 to begin selling the Motorola Droid, which is targeting Apple's iPhone with a killer ad campaign and offering Google Maps Navigation GPS and other perks such a 5 megapixel camera. The smartphone is $199 after a mail-in rebate. Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital says the mobile device requires a minimum $70 monthly service plan for two years, excluding text messaging. Gearlog has more on the service plans, noting that if you want to connect Droid to a Microsoft Exchange account, it will cost $30. Also, Verizon Wireless will enable Droid users to tether their smartphones to their laptops in 2010.
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T-Mobile CTO Cole Brodman says at the Open Mobile Summit that T-Mobile will let customers pay for Android applications on their monthly mobile bills starting Nov. 17. On that day, T-Mobile will also launch the T-Mobile Channel on Android Market to recommend some of the Market's apps to T-Mobile customers. Android Market currently hosts 12,000 applications, dwarfed by the 100,000 applications for Apple's iPhone. Android's growth is respectable for a platform that launched on smartphones little more than a year ago. The iPhone is a phenomenon no one has seen before in the nascent smartphone market.
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News Analysis: AT&T and Verizon Wireless might be battling out over their real coverage right now, but when it comes time to evaluate these companies and other wireless carriers, disappointment usually follows. Compared with wireless services overseas, the U.S. looks like a third-world country in terms of wireless coverage, 3G access, Internet connectivity and phone quality.
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Google has cultivated a lot of interest in the real-time collaboration market with its platform Google Wave. Now, business users will have a few other options as more companies are angling for a chunk of the of the real-time collaboration market. We’ll discuss the newcomers to the market. Last week we discussed the Android-based Motorola Droid, which many consider is the latest in a long line of would-be iPhone killers. So to find out how it really stacks up against other mobile devices - we went to BillShrink.com, where they did a side by side comparison of the Droid, iPhone and Pre. Dell is jumping into the carrier-subsidized netbook game with the release of its Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook and Lenovo just released its all in one pc the Lenovo A70z. Join Ashley Daley as she discusses the features of both computers.
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HTC's sleek HD2 smartphone gets a rollout in Europe and Asia, but consumers here will have to wait until early 2010, the company said.
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Approximately 2 million T-Mobile customers temporarily lose voice as well as text and picture messaging services. T-Mobile reports service was restored late Nov. 3 but adds another black eye to its reputation for quality of service.
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Economic pressures force Nokia Siemens to eliminate close to 6,000 jobs from its work force. The company plans to shrink its departments from five to three organizations in 2010, and plans on acquiring companies in its market in the coming year.
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After a French regulatory agency votes against the exclusive deal between Orange and Apple to distribute the iPhone in France, both companies agree to comply, leaving T-Mobile Germany as the last exclusive European distributor of the iPhone.
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The founder of a once high-flying online sports gambling company faces 51 months in prison and forfeitures of more than $50 million.
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Ribbit brought its cloud computing phone application to the mobile device sector Nov. 3 in the form of Ribbit Mobile, which lets users manage calls and messages to mobile phones from their computers. Ribbit Mobile aims to challenge existing Web services such as Google Voice and VoxOx, and offers many of the same services as those products. However, Ribbit features a third-party developer platform to enable programmers to build applications that extend the Ribbit Mobile platform.
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The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, the company’s first smartphone to run Google’s Android operating system, will arrive in the first quarter of 2010 and usher in a new line of phones that will likewise work to intuitively combine communications and entertainment.
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WildPackets debuts features like voice over IP (VOIP) extensions and additional 802.11n support for VoFi (Voice over Wi-Fi) deployment on its latest version of OmniPeek Distributed Analysis Suite.
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The current economy, business climate and technology trends have combined to make this a perfect time for hosted IP PBX systems. 8x8's Virtual Office is a turnkey system that provides all of the functionality of full-featured corporate PBX systems, without the upfront implementation and management costs. However, much of Virtual Office's Web-based interface is unintuitive, making ongoing management chores more difficult than they need to be.
Despite current iPhone limitations, Skype 1.0.1 for Apple iPhone performed well in eWEEK Labs' tests, providing most of Skype’s functionality--including instant message chats, presence and profile editing--on Wi-Fi, EDGE or (most likely) 3G. Voice calls are limited to Wi-Fi, but that can be a plus, depending on AT&T network coverage in your area. Next up is Skype support for (some) BlackBerry devices.
Savi Office, from Plantronics, offers more than a wireless headset solution with simultaneous connection to both a desk phone and PC. Savi Office also offers the PerSono software suite for controlling device behavior and for bridging content between communications channel. However, the flexible solution comes at a steep price and is not yet enterprise-ready. And it can only be used with Microsoft Windows-based PCs, though Plantronics says users of Apple Macs will be able to use the Savi Office devices as headsets.
With the recession raging and IT budgets contracting, enterprises looking to deploy unified communications solutions need to ensure that they're focused on the business objectives behind the plan. Even in this troubled economy, enterprises need to resist the urge to cut corners, which could hamper UC projects at the onset. IT administrators also must be careful with UC products that are on the market. Some UC solutions, like the ones from Unison, come up short on features that address all an enterprise's UC needs. Others, like those from Microsoft, fill most of a business's UC needs, but come at a high price.
Scopia Conferencing Platform manages to coax disparate conference room and desktop videoconferencing solutions into relative harmony.
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VOIP & Telephony 
