14 DAY TRIAL // Not long after Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, announced his company's intentions to allow VoIP communications on the iPhone and iPod Touch over Wi-Fi, SightSpeed expressed interest in bringing its services to the platforms. Steve noted during the Town Hall event in Cupertino that VoIP over the cellular network will not be allowed, but that Wi-Fi connected folks will not have a problem using the service, even with apps.
"We are interested and investigating porting our award-winning VOIP service to the iPhone," said Eric Quanstrom, vice president of marketing for SightSpeed, adding that their engineering team was "looking at" the newly released iPhone SDK (software development kit), according to eWeek.
Although the company is interested in bringing its service to the iPhone, Quanstrom believes there is at least one big challenge they'll have to face in doing so, and that's the fact that iPhone doesn't sport a second, front/screen camera, while SightSpeed's apps mostly focus on video chat, not just VoiP:
"The biggest high-level challenge of running on an iPhone is actually in the form factor-the camera. Currently, it is on the wrong side of the device-i.e., not the screen side-making two-way video telephony quite hard," Quanstrom said.
Quite hard as in impossible, really. Unless, of course, you'd be willing to turn your device around every time you have something to say, and then turn it back around when the other person wants to reply.
Quanstrom assures however that "[they] have solved for many of the other issues, like CPU, in building out [their] current product suite."
Jobs assured that Apple would not block third-party apps using VoIP over Wi-Fi, and while SightSpeed's "patented rate control algorithms ... do a really good job at pretty low bit rates," the company only needs to see widespread usage of Wi-Fi to be convinced they're moving in the right direction: "If Wi-Fi were widespread to the point of seamless usage, this would be a much better proposition," SightSpeed's man concluded.