At first sight, using any VoIP client on the iPhone or the iPod Touch (a.k.a. iDevices) may seem like a uninteresting thing. The reason for this is that Apple does not allow 3rd party applications to run in the background. So when a user close down his iVoIP Client he will not be able to receive any calls at all, thus defeating the reason for using VoIP on these devices in the first place.

However, if we take a look at some of the VoIP clients offerings available we notice that a few of these clients have the ability to receive incoming calls, even when the software it self is not running.

At first sight this seems to be a Good Thing - however, there are severe security implications by doing this. Users will in fact willingly, put them self under a man-in-the-middle attack.

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Back in August 2009 I did a guest appearance on the VoIP Users Conference speaking about VoIP clients for mobile telephones. I briefly touched on to a few offerings for the iPhone and iPod Touch (a.k.a. i-Devices). This inspired Randy a.k.a @voipusers to do a review of a few of the available offerings on i-Devices.

His article, along with my Fianceè buying herself an iPhone, prompted me to take a closer look at a few of the offerings available.

I have given SIP clients on the iPhone and iPod Touch a generic name: iVoIP Client(s). Likewise, an iDevice is a generic term for both the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

The following clients have been tested:

• iPico from MailVision Ltd
• iSIP from VNET Corporation
• WeePhone from Justin Bray
• Acrobits Softphone from Acrobits
• Media5-fone from Media5 Corporation

For completeness I have also taken a quick look at the SIP function in both Fring and Nimbuzz, two free (as in beer) offerings available for the iDevices.

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A fellow Twitter, Marius Jørgensrud, stated that Flash will die out as a format if the iPhone get support for Silverlight (all translation errors are on me).

My first reaction where that as long as the i-units (iPhone, iPod) are bringing in a lot of cash Apple would never deviate from the formula of creating i-units that just works. It is well known fact that Apple currently does not want to allow 3rd party applications to execute arbitrary code on their units. This is in fact the main reason why Flash and Java is not yet available on the units. Seen from a support (and business) point of view this makes perfectly sense: Do not allow anything that can degrade the end users positive experience with the units. I believe that this is also the reason why Apple does not allow 3rd party applications to multitask.

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