Frankly, I wonder what the motives really are for most people. It seems that everyone has gone mental about reducing their phone bills. I see people with a very comfortable salary who will go out of their way, spend time and effort, risk losing their number and the capacity to phone for weeks, tie themselves to long (typically 2 years) unchangeable contracts for saving, maybe, 5 or 10 Euros a month. Sorry, but I don't get it.

And the quality of service can be abysmal too, which is not due to voip but to the voip providers. Maybe I'll give some examples:

-about 2 years ago, I travelled to New Zealand. I can't go further away from home (Europe) while staying on this planet. Because I had a tablet, and long distance calls can be expensive, especially from hotels (although there are calling cards with quite reasonable rates), I arranged a sip adapter at home and installed gizmo on the tablet. From voip to voip the connection was cristal clear (and free) from Dubai, Singapore, Australia and NewZealand.

-since I put 10$ on that gizmo (sipphone) account, I have tried to use it to call regular phone. I still have over 9$ on the account. The quality when I call phones in Europe is so bad that I can't use it. It's obviously sipphone fault: the connection from their networks to the pots in Europe sucks.

-this year I opened another account with sipgate, because they give me a german phone number for free. Same story here: quality is fair when I call to Germany, abysmal when I call to France.

So I wonder. Are people really content with poor quality calls? Do people, in general, phone so much that the savings are substancial? A friends daughter spends her life with her cell phone. Even in that case the savings would barely be worth it.

It is a behaviour which defies logic. Besides, most people save pennies on their calls, but are fools for anything else. They spend 2-3€ per ringtone which they change every week while it is quite easy to use any free mp3 as ringtone. They fall for 2 years contracts because they want to buy the "latest" phone for free. They use premium sms at 2€ for 140 bytes. They send mms pictures when in vacation at 5€ the mms, etc...

I don't get it. I could, with a stretch of my imagination, understand why it is important, for many people, to be seen with the latest iPhone whatever the price is (for example). I don't get it when, at the same time, their motivation to have it jailbreaked is to use voip.

That, and fake Rolex or Vuitton bags, I don't get. Sorry.


The future N900 may be aimed at the general public. Probably. Nokia needs an iPhone competitor. I am not disputing that.

What I doubt (but I don't see the future) are:
-that a voip enabled cellphone would disrupt the market. My e51 can use voip over hsdpa out of the box, BTW.
-that this is Nokia's idea for the N900. Telcos are Nokia's main customers. I don't see Nokia directly aiming at their business.

Besides, telcos have an ace up their sleeve: they can always lower call rates to voip levels. I explained why this technically a better solution for them. I can also say that they can afford it: call charges make only a fraction of their business nowaday (less than half in Germany). Of course this may not be sufficient, since the customers are not rational in their choice and strongly believe that voip is "free" while cell rates are "expensive" whatever the price actually is.