TruPhone demos VoIP on iPhone today

A recent British startup company, TruPhone plans to demonstrate its recently announced native VoIP dialer for the iPhone to an audience of 350 delegates at DEMOfall 07 in San Diego, CA. The demonstration will comprise of two iPhones connected to Wi-Fi on the DEMOfall 07 stage. A VoIP call will be initiated from one handset, routed via Wi-Fi and the Internet to Truphone's servers, and then back again to the access point and onwards to the destination handset. The company says that today's event will be a live demonstration only and is not a commercial launch of Truphone on the iPhone, adding that the solution does not need to unlock the SIM in order to operate its service for the iPhone.

Not yet intended for the public, the software currently relies on an installation of Terminal, which accesses the phone's SIP stack to dial a call via Wi-Fi instead of through the SIM card. Before either Terminal or the VoIP app can be installed, users must still run a jailbreaking tool such as iBrickr or iFuntastic.

The company says it plans to eventually release a polished version of the software, one which will both simplify activation, and allow users to switch between VoIP on Wi-Fi and regular SIM dialing as one or the other becomes more practical.

TruPhone is a paid service for most cellphone-to-cellphone calls, but it allows free dialing and SMS messaging of other Truphone users, as well as free calls to landlines in countries such as Canada and the US. The company is technically not the first to try VoIP on the iPhone; Talkety launched a compatible service shortly after the iPhone itself was released, the difference being that Talkety is entirely web-based, requiring no hacking.