One complaint about the iPad in the lead-up to its launch was that it wasn’t a phone. This is arguably a little like complaining that a fridge is not a toaster. But it’s okay. It turns out the iPad is a phone after all.
Well, sort of. Read on.
Two different approaches
Early on, someone at Apple leaked the little secret or some smart cookie figured out and reported that it was actually possible to turn the iPad into a VoIP phone, by plugging in a USB headset using the optional Camera Connection kit.
The Camera Connection kit, a $29 accessory, includes two adapters that plug into the iPad’s lone connectivity port. One is a smart card reader, the other has a USB port. You plug in the USB adapter, then plug a headset into it.
We discovered that in fact you don’t need adapter or headset. With the right software—such as Skype or Toktumi’s Line2 for iPhone—the iPad’s built-in microphone and speakers turn it into a workable, if not great, speaker phone.
The whole notion of iPad as VoIP phone does beg a couple of questions, which we’d better deal with before going further. First, why would you even want to do this?
Who needs this?
We would argue that with the addition of a wireless Bluetooth keyboard, the iPad makes a viable laptop replacement for mobile workers with very light computing needs.
If all you need to do is check e-mail, do a little Web surfing and maybe review documents, the iPad is perfectly adequate. That it lets you watch YouTube, read e-books and listen to iTunes as well is a nice bonus.
It might not be able to do all of the business-y stuff really well, but it is a 1-pound device with a 10-hour battery life. What it lacks in functionality and performance, it makes up for in mobility.
Most mobile workers, it’s true, already carry cell phones. But many still want the option of using VoIP when in range of a Wi-Fi signal, to save money or, in some cases, access office PBX features.
The other big question: how well does this really work?
Does it do the job?
Dancing bears are impressive for a few minutes until you realize that, despite the tutu, they’re not ballerinas. The answer here is that iPad-as-VoIP-phone performs somewhere just short of ballerina class. Not too shabby at all in fact.
It does not work equally well with all VoIP services, and we only attempted it with free online services. If you want to use it with a hosted PBX service, it might be possible, given that CounterPath has an iPhone version of its flagship Bria softphone app, but we didn’t attempt this.
The test bed
We did test it with Skype, Toktumi Line2, Whistle and iCall, with varying results.
One thing to understand when trying this at home is that Apple doesn’t support the iPad as a VoIP phone. When you plug in a USB headset, you’ll see an error message saying, ‘The attached USB device is not supported.’ You can ignore that.
We initially tried a Plantronics DSP-400 headset, a four- or five-year-old collapsible bi-aural model designed for mobile use. It worked fine.
However, the iPad really doesn’t work with some USB phone devices. When we plugged in a Chat 50, the excellent USB speakerphone from ClearOne, the message was, ‘Accessory Unavailable: The attached accessory uses too much power.’
The power light on the ChatOne, which came on initially, went dark and the device simply didn’t work.
We had a similar result with an IPevo handset.
The network connection
We tested iPad-as-VoIP-phone over a very high-speed cable modem connection, which sometimes has poor upload speed but is generally VoIP friendly. The iPad was connected over Wi-Fi. (It’s a Wi-Fi-only model so we did not test VoIP over 3G.)
One minor annoyance is that the apps involved are all designed for iPhone and, presumably because iPad doesn’t officially support VoIP, have not been updated to take advantage of features such as landscape mode and the full resolution of the larger iPad screen.
This isn’t a huge deal. There is a 2X magnification feature with iPad that will enlarge an iPhone window to almost fill the iPad screen—if you want to make dial-pad buttons a little bigger, for example. It’s naturally a little pixilated but perfectly legible.
The other slight problem is that the USB adapter sticks out over an inch from the bottom of the iPad. When you plug in a headset as well, it’s a bit awkward to hold on your lap in portrait mode—and these apps won’t flip over to landscape mode when you turn the iPad so the adapter and cable sticking out the side.
You’re stuck either with the adapter and cable jammed against your stomach, or interacting with the software turned sideways.
Making calls
We tested Skype with both Skype-to-Skype calls and SkypeOut (calls from Skype on the iPad to regular phones on the PSTN). The results in both cases were consistently good—not great, but good.
This was despite occasionally getting a message from the app saying there wasn’t enough network speed—a message that didn’t make a lot of sense given the bandwidth requirements of a Skype call and the speed of my wireless network (802.11n). It’s also not a message we’ve seen when using Skype on a laptop or desktop on the same network. Maybe it was a response to lack of processing capacity.
There was some latency on Skype calls, but not much, if any, more than with calls from a PC.
Given that one of the iPad’s primary applications is music play-back, it’s not surprising that audio quality, at least at the iPad end, was quite good. It was good across all the services we tried—except where poor connections interfered.
We tested Toktumi Line2 only with computer-to-phone calls. The results were not quite as good as with Skype: similar level of latency, but some jitter manifesting as slight break-up of voices. But calls were still perfectly viable with both parties able to hear the other clearly.
The also-rans
Whistle, a free computer-to-phone service, worked but not well. There was latency of over a second on some test calls to regular phones and jitter (causing break-up) as well.
iCall, an ad-supported free computer-to-phone service, produced some hilariously bad connections with voices completely unintelligible and sounding like crazed grasshoppers from outer space.
As a speaker phone, using the built-in microphone and speakers, iPad veers into dancing-bear territory, although we did use it in this mode for one call to a stranger—to book a restaurant reservation. The person at the other end said we were intelligible but sounded as if we were calling over a bad cell phone connection.
The verdict
Is the iPad a phone after all? Not really. But in a pinch, you could use it to VoIP someone.
iPad News Source: voipplanet.com
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