Touchmods created a storm of interest when they announced a hack that adds a microphone to the Apple iPod touch and a SIP-based VoIP application that runs on the Apple iPod touch. Well controversy is brewing on Touchmods.net. Yesterday they announced that French ADSL provider Free.fr, has coded an iPhone VoIP application locked to that ISP's service. The site explains:However, since our first iPhone came as a donation from the French ADSL Provider Free (www.free.fr), the recent version of Siphon with iPhone support is temporarily locked to their service. Now, although Free is a French (European) provider, we do believe that many people will try out their service. We also know that many of you is now a little disappointed. As always: we will not let you down, but we also need to respect the ones who take us seriously and donate in time, ie. “before it works”! You need to understand our situation.
Thus, you have to be Free's customer living in France in order to use this app. Not surprisingly, many Touchmods readers are upset that this is an application for the iPhone and not the iPod Touch and that it is locked to a French ISP.
They try and lessen the blow when they write:
Of course, there will be an open version released in some days so that everybody can test SIP on iPhones and iPod Touch. But. In order to be on the safe side (you know what we mean) this open version will be time-limited, ie. you can not use it till the end of the world
Great, a time-restricted open version. Fantastic! Just what fans want.
Having an open SIP client would not only allow you to choose which ITSP to use, but you can also connect with your corporate SIP-based PBX, such as Asterisk and make/receive calls from anywhere. But a time-restricted version is useless. Ok, I'll cut them some slack since it's still very early on. Besides if Touchmods doesn't offer an open SIP client for the Apple iPod touch and/or the Apple iPhone then someone surely will.
