Review of Talkonaut, a mobile IM software supporting multiple SIP providers
Talkonaut used to be my favorite mobile IM software before it was replace by Fring and Nimbuzz. I am a little bit surprised about why it is not as successful as Fring and Nimbuzz. Let’s have a look about what Talkonaut is doing better than other mobile IM software and what keeps users away from it.
1. Support of multiple IM networks:
Pros.
Except Gtalk/Jabber network, Talkonaut also supports voice chat to Yahoo, MSN, AIM/ICQ, while Fring doesn’t and Nimbuzz is still struggling to provide such kind feature. It provides the chat room feature based on Jabber.
Cons.
Talkonaut only provide voice chat with Skype recently and it is via some kind property gateway. Talkonaut only has Yahoo, MSN and AIM/ICQ options in IM networks menu, though it may support more, for example Twitter, via Jabber transport. It is too complicated for ordinary users.
2. VoIP features:
Pros.
Talkonaut uses speex codec to compress the voice data, which makes it has very low requirement for bandwidth, even GPRS/EDGE will be sufficient. The most powerful feature of Talkonaut is the dial plan feature, which means that users can define multiple SIP providers and choose different SIP provider to dial different phone number to get lowest rate. Talkonaut also provide callback option which make it possible to use VoIP without fast data connections and powerful hardware.
Cons.
The voice quality is not so good even using WiFi connection. I think it is because of the low data rate codec.
3. User Interface.
Pros.
There is an option to load conversation history, which is very useful and I have seen it on other mobile IM software.
Cons.
No option to dial a number with cellular.
4. Nothing special to say about file transfer, users can send any kind of file from their phones, just like that.
5. The power consumption control of Talkonaut is as good as Fring and much better than Nimbuzz and so on.
My feeling is that the major problem of Talkonaut is not very easy to use. It requires quite some effort to use the powerful features of Talkonaut, which is not so good for software in nowadays.
[...] call their IM buddies from their Java-enabled non-smart mobile phones via the callback feature of Talkonuat. Of course, they need to have credit in their account to use this [...]
[...] 译自Review of Talkonaut, a mobile IM software supporting multiple SIP providers [...]
Talkonaut is paired with the gtalk2voip service, a sip/jabber gateway. It has a great design. Pairing jabber with sip has the potential to really benefit the consumer.
While testing this service, though, I’ve come across a show-stopper: sip to sip calls are limited to 3 minutes. I’ve also encountered the same limit calling from a google talk to a gizmo5 jabber account, jabber to jabber.
To get past the 3 minute limit, the user has to subscribe to a premium service that costs $5 a month.
The faq pages on the Talkonaut site indicate that such calls are unrestricted. I assume that Talkonaut has recently changed its policy, and that the faq has not been updated.