Voice Messaging on MSM

[Guest mrjuglas]

I can understand why this hasn't been included on MSM but there are good arguments for letting you talk to your buddies through Messenger, especially for people who have contacts abroad. It may seem that Orange is going to lose out on international phone tariffs, but that is rarely the case, after all I'm not going to phone my buddy in Austria or Australia but when they're online we chat.

It seems stupid to be trying to type on a phone keyboard when there's a perfectly good microphone, speaker/headphones and a strong data connection! C'mon Orange, it's going to happen sooner or later anyway, why not be at the vanguard???

[Guest NXNM]

This will probably never happen, Orange wont loose out on phone tarrifs, youve got chat if you want to call him/her your going to have to pay. It is not financially viable to do this on Oranges part or on your part because of the GPRS charges. Also i dont think a converstaion would be good enough as i have noticed GPRS is very slow and choppy and struggles to send a smooth datastream.

[Guest Gorskar]

Have you any Idea how much data that would use up?

You'd go bankrupt!!!! (when the spv pack runs out)

[Guest HelloDave]

You'd go bankrupt!!!! (when the spv pack runs out)

What do you mean, when it runs out :( But £8/mb...ouch!

But seriously, the SPV running messenger and compressing voice data and recieving and decompressing voice data all at the same time. You are having a laugh! It can't even navigate menu's smoothly :( Remember that the MSN voice protocol is very unlikely to use the GSM codec that the phone uses for speech, so the compression/decompression would all have to be done in software, and that's never gonna happen! Ever tried recording an amr sound for an MMS? It takes the SPV much longer that the 6 seconds of the sound file to compress it. It'd be quicker to have a postal chat :D

[Guest ajb3000]

it would be cheaper to ring australia, Orange offer very good internation calling rates. Voice over GPRS would be rediculously expensive, and it would be choppy. Now if the phone supported HSCSD it would be cheaper.

[Guest mrjuglas]

yes, that's all true, it'd never work. At least not with the SPV's capabilities, we'll just have to wait for 3G. Good idea though, I thought.

[Guest spacemonkey]

Voice over IP from phones will happen but yes, I think this is much more likely to be in the 3G era.

At the moment the phone companies haven't got their s*** together over data and what it will ultimately mean. But look at SMS, that's the real rippoff. a 200 byte maximum or so message and they charge you 10p for it.... that's insane.

The sooner we get to the point where you just have a device and you pay for a data connection and some costing to do with data usage the better. Then what you use it for is your business, the phone company won't know the difference (or care) whether it's SMS, Voice, MSN or Web.

[Guest mrjuglas]

couldn't agree more, we're getting there - this phone is a huge step. I just hope that they don't kill off demand with exorbitant data charges, stopping us from using it to its full potential.

[Guest Emad]

I'd imagine demand would be high even if they keep on with their stupid data charges (mind you, I don't know how much it costs them, maybe it really is that expensive), thanks to all the other features crammed in there. The main thing would be that the data services wouldn't take off - people go oooh and aaah when they see msn on my phone/their page splashed out in ie - make it reasonable and demand for those services will increase.