The Spectralink 8400 Series is designed with diverse workplaces in mind such as healthcare, hospitality, retail, manufacturing and general office.

The handset is designed to allow workers to communicate with other colleagues on site quickly and easily by utilising the industry standard SIP protocol for communication with VoIP PBXs and offering advanced features such as integrating communication with Microsoft® Office Communications Server instant messaging.

The advantage of the concept is that keeping your old hardware in place and just hooking it up to Speakeasy’s SIP based network will save significant expenditure on hardware procurement. It’s not a particularly new approach to the problem of voip deployment in the sense that analog to voip converters have been around since the first days of voip but the offering of an integrated product with support for fairly-large existing PBXs certainly is.

That’s all assuming I understood their press release correctly

Speakeasy press release: http://www.speakeasy.net/press/pr/pr030209b.php

EUROJUST, the European Union’s judicial cooperation unit, is to examine the possibilities of bugging voip calls within the EU.

This comes after news that Italian law-enforcement agencies have requested help from EUROJUST in tapping voip calls made by criminals in Italy.

EUROJUST mention Skype by name but also include their intention to examine other voip systems in their press release. In the case of Skype which uses a proprietary protocol and encryption system, EUROJUST would presumably need to coerce Skype who are incorporated in Luxembourg to hand over encryption keys or create a ‘back door’ in their software to allow government wiretapping.

In the alternate case of SIP or similar VoIP communications, many calls may currently be transmitted ‘in the clear’ and be easy to intercept by simply capturing the packet stream for later playback. In cases where encryption is employed either in the protocol or the connection level, wiretapping may prove to be considerably more difficult as even the fact that a call is being made over a normally-encrypted data connection may be difficult or impossible to detect.

Neo Freerunner does not yet have a VoIP application but with it’s built-in WiFi and linux based, open software architecture, it looks like it will only be a matter of time before a SIP compliant application is ported. Telepathy, a framework which allows IM and Voice over IP integration looks like a prime candidate.

The Neo Freerunner is designed with sensitive corporate environements in mind. The lack of camera and the possibility of a full code audit should put minds at ease in the board-room.

Specifications:

Connectivity:

• GSM
• Bluetooth 2.0
• GPRS
• AGPS
• WiFi (in final version)
• USB 1.1 slave and host
• 2.5-mm audio jack

Memory

• 128 MB SDRAM
• 256 MB NAND flash

Display

• 2.8 in. VGA (480×640) TFT

Dimensions

• 120.7mm × 62mm × 18.5mm

The Neo Freerunner is available now in North America, Europe and Asia with a MSRP of $399 US.

The Snom M3 allows for multiple DECT wireless handsets with full-color graphical displays to make and receive SIP calls over any compliant network.

The Snom M3 system involves a base-station which provides network and control facilities including a web confiiguration interface. Up to 8 individual wireless DECT handsets can be connected to each base-station. The base-station can handle up to three simultaneous calls.

Product video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Snom M3 is to be available in the USA as of June 2008.

When deployed, Bria (and presumably other SIP standard) users will be able to dial a four digit number to create a conference on the Quick Conference server.

Quick Conference features web-based administration, IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook calendar integration and remote management via PDA.

Listed and reviewed in the article are Nokia’s own Gizmo, Truphone, EQO, Skype, fring and Yeigo
.

The article updates an earlier review of S60 Voice over IP applications.

No real detail or grit is given on the product although I would hope that it would be a SIP or at least standards-based system unlike Skype which is uses a proprietary method.

The service is said to be designed to ultimately be available for mobile devices with 3G or 4G connections so presumably the model would be direct connection or client/server connection rather than Skype’s P2P routing model.

Some more detail over in Om Malik’s article.

The 6300i, developed (inevitably) from the Nokia 6300 now includes WiFi connectivity and a Voice over IP capability. Nokia’s developer site suggests that the handset will communicate on the SIP protocol for VoIP with the potential to make such calls over either GSM or local WiFi networks.

The 6300i is set to ship to ‘select markets’ in the second quarter of 2008 with a MSRP of €175