The iPhone has WiFi. This opens up some awesome possibilities for VOIP/SIP connections over the WiFi to help supplement the AT&T plan. I’m almost always around WiFi at work, home, and school, and when I purchased the iPhone I was hoping I could get a setup that would allow me to make some calls over either VOIP or SIP to cut down on my AT&T minutes.
I started following a few different options, most of which included jailbreaking the phone. That’s not something I’m going to do, so I just continued to wait. I began stalking a solution called iCall on Twitter and Facebook, and beat the crowd and became 1 of 100 beta testers for their application. It’s OK, but it’s not the best solution in the world (crashes every now and then, etc). Their demo shows people transferring calls from the cellular network to the iCall application, but I haven’t been able to figure that out. Granted, I need to download the new beta version of that program in order to truly evaluate the most recent version of the iCall application. I should also mention that once iCall is up and running and out of beta, recent plans mentioned that they’ll charge $10/month for unlimited usage.
The other possible solution is a link of several solutions. Gizmo5 is a SIP service much like Skype, and it’s pretty decent. Inbound calls are free. I can get an inbound call to Gizmo5 by routing it through my GrandCentral number or having people call my Gizmo5 number directly. However, calling out is the trick – in order to call out via Gizmo5 and it not cost money, I have to use a dialer (like GrandCentral’s web button, or several other services) that first calls the Gizmo5 number and then calls the destination number – thus both the inbound calls (other caller to my G5 number) and my outbound calls (dialer calls my G5 number) are considered “inbound” and allows me to make free calls.
A solution just showed up on Apple’s application store called Fring that is a dialer – If you want to make some calls through Gizmo5, just set up a G5 account and download Fring. Give it a try and see what you think – I don’t have it down to a science yet, but free calls sound good to me.
Until next time (I’ll update when I get my preferred setup more figured out), take care of yourselves.
Colin
Upon further investigation and testing, Fring appears to dial directly through Gizmo5, which DOES use Gizmo5 credits. If you want to make free calls, you need a third party dialer like GrandCentral… just browse on your computer to GrandCentral, select a contact in the address book and hit call through Gizmo5 (while having Fring open on your iPhone), and the iPhone will ring, then attempt to call your contact.
Somewhat complicated? Yes. Free? Also yes.
I should mention that Fring also works with Skype and tons of other VOIP/SIP clients and chat applications.
Is that all there is to it? Let me see if I follow…
I'm at grandcentral.com on my computer. I find a contact (a phone at work). I say I want to call from Gizmo. My phone is on, fring is open, I'm connected via T-Mobile and Wireless internet…. but no call comes in. Is there something I'm missing?
Wait — I got it. It does work!
My problem was that Gizmo5 was setup to forward all calls. I turned that off and it worked perfectly.
How about this… instead of initiating the call on your computer's grandcentral.com, how about the iphone's browser Grandcentral.com/mobile. When I try this I do get the call but the person I call can't hear me.