Apple shook up the mobile phone playing field with the introduction of the original iPhone a year ago. Phones with touchscreens were nothing new; most Windows Mobile phones have used them for years. But the older phones used resistive digitizer screens, which were operated by a tiny metal stylus. The iPhone uses a capacitive digitizer that’s operated by touching fingers to the screen — a remarkably convenient option, by comparison. It didn’t take consumers long to figure out this was the way to go with touch and other phone makers quickly followed Apple’s lead.

While making a handset with a touchscreen is no big technical feat, the process quickly makes clear the pivotal role that Apple’s UI plays in producing a good user experience. Indeed, UI often ends up being the crucial factor that separates the good phones from the rest. And while the number of phones competing with the iPhone is growing all the time, most come from three companies:

HTC -- Until the last couple of years, HTC was largely making phones for other companies, such as Palm. But once they introduced their own brand to the market, they quickly established themselves as high-end device makers. HTC was also one of the first to dive headfirst into the touch phone pool, and have since produced model after model.

The first (and still available) was the HTC Touch, a phone based on the Windows Mobile platform. Going with the Windows Mobile OS was an easy decision for HTC since it’s a mature platform with tools to handle both the consumer and enterprise markets. The problem is that it wasn’t designed from the ground up for a touch operation, which can severely limit such a phone’s usability. So HTC designed the TouchFLO interface, which sits on top of the Windows Mobile base and adds touch features.

While the HTC Touch wasn’t a bad first attempt, it fell short of being a solid competitor to the iPhone. It followed up this year with the release of the Touch Diamond. A sleek black phone with an enhanced UI designed for touch, it has been well received. And since Windows Mobile has more features than the iPhone, the Touch Diamond was an instant, solid competitor.

This month HTC extended their touch offering with the Touch Pro, which is very similar to the Diamond but also includes a slide-out QWERTY keypad for business users. The lack of such a feature on the iPhone has been roundly criticized by serious email users.

Currently HTC is creating a lot of buzz in the enthusiast community with its yet-to-be-released handset, the Dream. This touch phone is said to be based on the brand-new Google Android platform that T-Mobile is expected to launch next month. Information is gradually leaking out about the Dream — it looks like a device similar to the Touch Pro, complete with a large touchscreen coupled with a sliding QWERTY keyboard.

LG — Electronics giant LG has been making feature phones for years and have produced some solid touchscreen, non-phone devices. Feature phones have typically been viewed as less capable than their smartphone competition, but that criticism is harder to make these days as feature phones can now handle PIM functions and messaging. LG’s first touchscreen phone was the Voyager, which includes two displays — one big touchscreen on the front of the device, as is common, and a non-touchscreen on the inside. The keyboard flips up like a small laptop to be used with the interior screen, making the Voyager a distinctly different type of phone.

Most recently LG has followed up with the Dare, a phone without a keyboard that is touchscreen only. The UI, however, has been optimized for touch operation.

Samsung — Electronics firm Samsung has jumped into the touch phone game in a big way with the recent release of the Instinct, using a media advertising blitz to make clear how serious they were about this new genre. The Instinct has only been out a short while, but it’s already getting rave reviews, and from experts that are known for being hard on such devices. Its web browsing capabilities, notably, rival that of the iPhone.

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Business Week today has a good summary of various mobile VoIP services that allow you to make phone calls from your cellphone over the Wi-Fi network. These apps are incredibly popular amongst people who use iPhones, thanks to services such as Truphone and Gorilla Mobile, while others like iCall will soon join the party. And that is just the beginning.

By 2011 the number of mobile VoIP users around the world may rise to 100 million from 7 million in 2007, according to ON World, a consulting firm based in San Diego. ON World estimates that in 2011, mobile VoIP voice services may generate $33.7 billion, up from $516 million in 2006, the most recent year for which the figure is available.

WiFi-based voice calls may not appear to make much sense in this era of $99, flat-rate unlimited plans, but when you have to make a lot of international long distance calls, the cost saving are humongous. I use Truphone on my iPhone and/or my Nokia e71 to make calls to my family and friends in India as well as to my sources, which are spread across the world.

There are times when I have used Skype (via iSkoot) on my mobiles to make calls, but Truphone is my service of choice. I save a lot of money when compared to what calls cost on the AT&T network.

No wonder phone companies don’t have much use for Wi-Fi unless they can use it off-load calls from the precious wireless spectrum to the Wi-Fi network. Others, like T-Mobile USA, have come up with a way to measure calls made via Wi-Fi hotspots and count them against wireless subscriber minutes, unless you sign up for an additional $10-a-month plan, Business Week notes.

So obviously they’ve gone out of their way to neuter VoIP services like Truphone. More recently, Nokia decided to take out VoIP functionality from some of its N-Series devices, like the N78 and the forthcoming N96, in what could very well be called carrier arm-twisting.

I think that if carriers want to compete with mobile VoIP they need to lower their long-distance prices to that of VoIP services. By using their network backbones they can offer convenience and quality to trounce the upstarts. The problem is that wireless companies will not make this logical move — until it’s too late.

Related Stories:

* 7 Ways to VoIP From Your Mobile Phone.
* iSkoot, Not Skype, Launched on Symbian.

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Nokia, the leading handset maker, has been a favorite of ours for two reasons –- it ruthlessly promoted and added Wi-Fi connectivity to its handsets and added VoIP functionality to its devices.

Carriers did not view these technology developments too kindly since it prevented them from extorting exorbitant amounts of cash for costly long distance connections, leading to the rise of mobile-VoIP players such as Truphone, Fring and Gizmo Project.

But now the Finnish giant seems to have developed cold feet, and some of its new handsets, such as the new N78, are not VoIP compatible anymore. Many of these phones are not on the list of Nokia’s VoIP compatible handsets. A reader tipped us off about this apparent change in the latest N-series phones.

…the N78 (and also to affect the forthcoming N96) which is that Nokia has very quietly and seemingly sneakily redacted their built-in VoIP / SIP implementation in all phones that come with Symbian Series 60 3rd generation Feature Pack 2 (otherwise abbreviated as S60 3.2).

I have a N78 lying around so I decided to test it myself. And lo-and-behold none of the VoIP services I am accustomed to using worked. Truphone and Gizmo are two services I typically use and neither of them work.

Ditto for Fring, a VoIP-IM service as well. However, all three worked on the Nokia E71 smart phone. When I asked Nokia if this was true, the company sent me this response, which pretty much admits that is the case, though it didn’t say why.

Nokia Nseries is committed VoIP services as part of its offering. That is why we have included SIP stack and improved the developer VoIP offering in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 by enhancing the VoIP APIs to improve the call quality, as an example.

A Nokia VoIP client is not included with the Nokia N78 and the Nokia N96 and VoIP solutions based on this particular client such as Gizmo will not work. However, Forum Nokia will cooperate with third-party developers to support them in porting their applications from S60 3.0/3.1 releases to S60 3.2. One example is Fring, whose popular application will be offered via Nokia’s Download! service for the Nokia N96.

Truphone isn’t waiting around for Nokia to do something. A company spokesman told us: “From Truphone’s perspective Nokia has removed the VoIP client from all the N-Series phones for the planned future. We are putting in a replacement client functionality so that existing customers are not orphaned.”

The theory is that Nokia isn’t mucking with E-series devices because they are more enterprise focused. Since VoWLAN is more popular with the corporations, Nokia can’t afford to remove the VoIP functionality. It is one feature that makes the phones more competitive with say Blackberry.

On the consumer front, however, voice-over-WiFi has become a thorn in the side of carriers, as exemplified by actions of carriers such as T-Mobile against VoWiFi-startups such as Truphone. Furthermore, the emergence of 3G has made it easier to route calls over the 3G network.

Funnily enough, the decision to back away from built-in VoIP comes at a time when fixed mobile convergence is finally beginning to gain traction, especially in Europe and Asia. In the U.S., Nokia launched a handset that works with T-Mobile’s Hotspot@Home service.

Nokia has to be taking a lot of heat from carriers over making VoIP easy on its devices. Whichever way you look at it, I think it is a bone-headed move by the company, which should be trying to out-innovate its competitors and be more open in terms of its features.

The decision also brings into question company’s new mantra of being open and open-source friendly. Being open isn’t about releasing some software in open source, but it is about having an open mind. Shutting down a much loved VoIP feature isn’t exactly the right move.

As our reader very aptly wrote:

….does this move by Nokia really appear to be the type of move that is indicative of a culture shift towards open source per the Symbian Foundation? Google is already culturally rooted in open source (its entire infrastructure runs on Linux clusters). I am not so confident about Nokia’s ability to shift to open source…

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