VoIP Cell Phones Coming

bp33 writes "Wireless Newsfactor is running a story about how the wireless vendors are climbing over themselves to get Voice-Over-IP cell phones. You might ask "why bother? We already have wireless voice now." But with an open platform for wireless (Symbian, JavaPhone etc), your "voice" (er .. audio) just becomes bits that your programs can manipulate before sending."

Comments

What about viri?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great this is just what I need. Now someone can write a virus that runs on my cell phone and changes the words I speak.

"I'd like a large pizza" will become "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?"

Re:and...?

[SandSpider]

One example would be encryption - you could, for example, use gpg to encrypt the packets, or whatever the latest hot encryption scheme is. If you want to change it, that's a simple task, since it's just software. You don't have to buy and install new hardware just to change the way the phone works.

And, of course I know that it would be impractical to do with the current VoIP systems, since a lost packet would cause no end of difficulty. I'm talking in an ideal world.

It wouldn't be necessary to do VoIP to do this, though. Special 'data-phones' could be made that start a call, check to see if there's a compatible phone on the other end, and start a data connection if so. Though that wouldn't be very high quality over a 56k modem, chances are, though you could get by a lot better with a specialized protocol that doesn't have the overhead of TCP/IP, I suspect. But really, I'm just making all this up, now.

=Brian