Intel has just launched its first appstore - in the shape of appdeveloper.intel.com.

Targeted at Netbooks, appdeveloper.intel.com is more than just another Apple-style appstore. It’s also a set of tools to help developers build applications that run on Atom. Integrating into common IDEs, Intel’s Atom SDK contains tools to help manage your applications, as well as integrating with Intel’s ecommerce platform for licensing and for handling delivery of additional content.

There’s a lot in appdeveloper.intel.com, and more to come. IDE support is a ways off, and it’ll be interesting to see how Intel handles integration with Eclipse and Visual Studio (and how it intends to deliver support to Flash Builder and Aptana). Sign ups are already open, and are free for now ($99 in the future), and there’s plenty of content on the site, so developers can get started quickly.

One big difference from other appstores is the developer catalog - where you’ll find components you can use in your own applications. Intel’s planning on building a developer ecosystem with its Atom offering, and getting tools out there is important. Software components and component stores were one of the drivers that contributed to the success of Visual Basic, and it’s good to see that Intel has learnt that part of the developer ecosystem lesson… The first batch of components is up already, and includes power and network management tools as well as video capture libraries.

There’s also a cross-platform bent to the site that’s refreshing. Developers can use the site to work with two operating systems - the Intel-sponsored Moblin Linux and Windows 7 - and two run times - Java and Adobe’s AIR. Moblin is becoming increasingly important to Intel (and we wouldn’t be surprised to see a tie up between it and Google’s ChromeOS in the future), and this year’s IDF will also see it get a new release and a whole new UI.

However the big winner here is Adobe. AIR’s still a relatively new arrival on the application development scene, but one that’s quickly picked up some very significant mindshare. With netbook’s relative low power, and near ubiquitous connectivity, there’s a lot of synergy between the hardware and Adobe’s rich internet application vision.

Yet Another Appstore it may be, but appdeveloper.intel.com looks set to be an important tool for developers who want to work with the growing netbook segment - and who want to turn them into devices that are actually useful rather than glorified Gmail appliances.

–S

It used to be so easy.

IT departments got to define just what could be used by a company’s staff. Everything from PCs to laptops to phones was in their purview, and everything that could be controlled was - locked down and managed to make sure that nothing went wrong.

But then came a rash of new devices, of new services, and a new generation of staff.

They’d grown up with a flexible world, and they wanted nothing less from their employers.

At least Windows group policies meant that a proliferation of desktop PCs could be managed, but how could new mobile devices be controlled - and how could potentially expensive roaming bills be managed?

Laptops were safely under control, as tools like iPass gave businesses the  ability to manage WiFi access, with one flat fee for each user every month, rather than having to pay expensive hotspot roaming rates.With WiFi now a common smartphone feature, it can also be used to avoid data roaming costs(as well as delivering more bandwidth than slow and congested 3G data services). That’s where iPass’ new strategy comes in, as instead of just delivering Windows and Windows Mobile clients, there are also Mac, iPhone and Symbian versions of the software - with more to come. There’s another advantage here, as the same username and password can be used with mobile devices as well as with laptops, keeping billing to the same single flat fee per user.

We recently spent some time with the iPass iPhone client, and were pleasantly surprised that it worked around the device’s limitations effectively (and  still works happily with OS 3.0). There’s a BlackBerry client on the horizon now, too, which will make it a lot easier for roaming BlackBerry users to avoid racking up their bills (though there still needs to be a better way of managing which browser you’re using on a BlackBerry). And of course these are tools you can push out to users, using device management suites to make sure that only devices with WiFi hardware get the software they need.

Tools like this mean one simple thing: any device is an enterprise device.

And you know? That’s a good thing.

–Simon

Three years ago, when WiMAX looked like the best way to get faster mobile data, the then head of Vodafone made a point of stating the obvious at the Mobile World Congress; the networks would rather stick to 3G, the HSPA enhancements and eventually the ‘Long Term Evolution’ standard because evolving your network may be painful, but it’s better than ripping it out and putting in a brand new one, especially when they’d need twice as many base stations to provide the same coverage. But if HSPA and LTE didn’t show signs of showing up and speeding up to match the 100Mbps WiMAX promised in the long term, the convenience wasn’t going to stop the networks abandoning 3G.

3G speeds have been creeping up ever since, from 1 to 3.6 to 7 and now to 14.4Mbps. On the face of it that sounds faster than the average 2Mbps DSL connection in the UK; faster even than the 8Mbps you get on a faster exchange. But there’s a dirty little secret about most mobile broadband connections. It’s not just that the quoted speed is always a theoretical maximum and just as you never get a gigabit of data a second over gigabit Ethernet, you need to take off a quarter to a third from the maximum speed. It’s not just that the actual speed is shared with everyone else using data on the same cell; it’s that the speed quoted and the actual speed delivered are both only the speed to connect to the base station - not the Internet. And a surprising number of 3G base stations connect on to the Internet over 2Mbps DSL (and remember; you’re still sharing that speed with up to 50 other users in the same cell).

Not Vodafone; backhaul matters, says Vodafone CTO Jeni Mundy. “The pipes we put into the cell sites are key for anything you want to do on the Vodafone network or going out to the Internet; the bandwidth of those pipes is critically important and we’re absolutely doing not just a base station upgrade, we’re making sure we put the right backhaul in place to carry that traffic.”

In this case, rather than a single 2Mbps line, each Vodafone base station has eight 2Mbps E1 fibre connections adding up to 16Mbps of bandwidth. That’s courtesy of the deal Vodafone did last spring to connect to BT’s 21 Century Network and it means there’s slightly more than enough backhaul to deal with the incoming connections.

Vodafone’s press release about the launch was far more honest than most discussions of mobile broadband, which often suggest that no-one could tell the difference from DSL. Instead of trumpeting that Vodafone has the first 14.4 network in the UK, it pointed out “whilst 14.4 Mbps is the theoretical peak rate, customers can expect to see typical speeds of anything between 1 and 4 Mbps with a practical maximum speed of 10.8 Mbps.”

Mundy was equally frank about what that actually delivers: “As you improve the speed it works in two ways. If you look at the purest end, you can get up to 10.8Mbps -but in reality, few users get all the bandwidth. Where you have a number of users, we’re able to have those users further away from the cell because we’ve got more capacity. We can either have a broader cell coverage area or a much higher speed for single users, so you get advantages either way and the smarts of our technology will optimise that to maximise the benefit for users at any one time.”

The 14.4 network is live in the “busy areas” of London, Birmingham and Liverpool already; other areas - like London suburbs - will have the faster speeds by next March and Vodafone estimates that 80% of the 3G handsets and dongles that currently connect to their network can use the faster speed. And for once, a faster speed really will give you a faster connection.
-Mary

But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices  called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.

Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).

The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.

Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.

That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”

Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.

Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).

If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-Mary

We’ve been helping a friend get to grips with mobile browsing on his aging BlackBerry. It’s one that’s old enough that it doesn’t get the new browser that arrived with the Bold, so he’d been using Opera Mini to at least get something that approached a decent browsing experience. Even so he was hitting what I think of as the mobile browsing wall: the mobile web is not the web we get on our desktops.

Our friend uses a lot of online forums, and Opera Mini was starting to show its limitations. Most of the social aspects of the sites were lost as he was redirected to mobile versions of the sites - with drastically cut down user interfaces. The in-cloud reformatting the Opera Mini was doing wasn’t helping, either…

Opera recently sent us a whole pile of statistics about how people are using their Mini browser. The numbers make interesting reading, with impressive numbers of people using the service to view huge numbers of web pages. But if I was running Opera I would be getting very worried about my mobile business indeed…

“Nokia phones continue to be the handsets of preference for Opera Mini users, with Sony Ericsson claiming second place. BlackBerry and Samsung phones are the preference in the United States.”

Nokia is in the process of rolling out a WebKit-based browser, which should bring iPhone class browsing to much of its Symbian platform. Sony Ericsson is enroute to Android, and while its Java-based feature phone platform works well for Opera, new Java-based platforms like Bolt are rolling out that give users access to a much more powerful in-cloud browser, with support for Flash and for Silverlight. BlackBerry will get a significant browser upgrade in the autumn with the release of BlackBerry OS 5.0, and our Windows Mobile in-cloud browser of choice SkyFire is currently testing its own BlackBerry version. Samsung’s own browser is also in the middle of upgrading.

The foundations of the Opera Mini business model are crumbling. What was a story of broken browsers and unsatisfying online experiences is changing into one where high end devices like the iPhone are changing the way users think about mobile browsing - and mobile device manufacturers are having to follow. Opera needs to make a jump that takes its desktop rendering engine into the cloud, rather than the current service.

It’ll be interesting to see if Opera Mini can evolve to deal with the demands of its users.

Oh, and our friend?

He’s now using the beta of Bolt and finding the mobile web a much more desktop-like place.

We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.

This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.

George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…

You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.

Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.

Sure, many of them will be hooked up to “free” WiFi connections, but don’t expect them to remain free for long when the costs of running the services increase with a sudden massive leap in demand. Cloud services are bandwidth hungry, pushing expensive UI functionality down to local devices. Google’s Chrome OS’s reliance on Google’s online services (even with Gears’ offline web functionality) will fundamentally change the economics of offering wireless services - and not in a good way for the network operators.

Gilder, like many of the proponents of free services, was right to say that the digital world makes many things essentially free to the end user. However, again like many of today’s freevangelists, he was wrong to ignore the costs of infrastructure. Yes, 0.01p is almost zero, but when a hundred million people are using that low cost service, that fraction of a penny quickly adds up into sizable amounts of pounds.

That’s why there’s minimal cellular data service in huge parts of the world, and why travelling on the Tube cuts you off. It’s just too expensive.

We won’t be “always connected” as much as we want to be - especially in the current economic climate. Capital and operating expenses are being slashed across the board, and even giants like Vodafone are looking to buy other networks just to get access to their base stations. Rolling out the network needed for Chrome OS to be everything that Google wants will take time, and will also take truckloads of money.

Always on and always connected are wonderful ideals - but that’s all they are. It took me a long time to realise this, even as I spent years consulting on massive wireless Internet projects. Chrome OS needs free wireless bandwidth, and that’s not something that’s going to happen for a long time - and a massive spike in demand is something that could push it even further away.

I’d like to be wrong. I like Chrome the browser, I like the Chrome OS concept - and I’m especially fond of many of the HTML 5 features that Google is building into its latest applications and services. The web needs an upgrade, and Google is driving that upgrade.

The web isn’t the only thing that needs an upgrade - wireless data networks (as much as Telstra and the like talk about HSPA+ deployments) need a massive amount of work. However I’ve come to know the restrictions of the mobile networks, and the economic realities facing their operators. Without substantial infusions of cash, that upgrade is a long long way off.

It’s a problem that affects us all - not just Google and Chrome OS. We’re being sold a hyper-connected online world where everything’s available 24 hours a day, wherever we are - what we used to call “Martini computing”: any time, any place. What we’re actually getting is wireless networks like AT&T and O2 which are struggling to cope with the minimal demands of iPhone users. How are they going to cope with bandwidth hungry Chrome OS users running their entire lives through online services?

Google could just have fallen into an old, old hype trap.

Google is a company that’s built itself on a basis of abundance - cheap CPU, cheap memory, cheap disk. Mobile operators manage a world of scarcity, and work hard to make sure that things remain scarce and expensive. They’re two diametrically opposed views - and Chrome OS is where they’re going to collide.

The real war isn’t Google vs Microsoft. It’s going to be Google vs the mobile operators. I’m just not sure that Google is going to win.

–Simon

It’s probably about buying market share and reducing the competition that drives down prices, but there’s a new problem for mobile operators to think about these days - bandwidth and backhaul.

No matter how fast the 3G chipset in your mobile phone, you’re not getting on the Internet at that speed; you might have 3, 7 or 14Mbps between your phone and the base station but that base station is connected into the net at the same DSL speed as your home broadband. And you’re sharing that with everyone else  connected to that base station; say the 50 people in the same mile radius on the same network. Wimax and LTE promise speeds of 80-100Mbps; that means backhaul will have to get much faster and wider - according to a recent In-Stat report, backhaul capacity has to triple by 2013 to a worldwide total of 90,000Gbps to match demand. To get faster speeds needs faster physical  connections; faster DSL, expensive fibre optic cable or laser links. And that costs money…

Vodafone and T-Mobile both use BT for backhaul. Last year Vodafone started rolling out Tellabs’s Ethernet-based backhaul to replace the legacy voice network it was previously built on top of (getting an IP network for next-generation services at the same time);or rather BT is doing it for them (it’s all part of the ’21st Century Network’). O2 is taking the same service, and T-Mobile had signed up for it a year before that. Currently the system promises to deliver up to 60Mbps (a big improvement on the 2Mbps at most base stations). If T-Mobile is further along with the rollout, buying them could give Vodafone better bandwidth faster - and in the long run that could be worth as much as buying market share.

T-Mobile users might want to cross their fingers that the deal goes through (which is far from certain). Coverage and the weather and device configuration and the number of other people around and whole bunch of other variables make it hard to compare networks precisely, but of all the networks I test phones with Vodafone consistently gives me the best connection and coverage.
-Mary

Today is the first day of Wimbledon, and it’s also the release of IBM’s first consumer augmented reality application, Seer (for Android mobile devices).

Here’s Seer in action:

Augmented reality is one of the upcoming killer applications for mobile devices, where the built-in sensors mix with geocoded information to tell you just what you’re seeing - and at the same time give you more information about it. Seer’s an annotated window into the Wimbledon, using the device’s camera, built-in GPS, compass, and G-sensor. The combination of the four lets the software know where the phone is, and where it is pointing - and at what angle - at which point it overlays relevant information on the camera view of the world, in your own personal heads-up display.

What IBM is doing is an interesting example, as it links straight into IBM’s Wimbledon data feeds (and its Twitter stream!). It’s easy to see how this type of tool can be adapted to business applications. Plug Seer into a logistics feed, and you’ll be able to “see” just what’s in each package on a shop floor, or in each truck on a loading dock. Perhaps it’ll help your sales staff identify the products your customers are using, or give estate agents a new tool for annotating houses.

Seer’s not the only AR application out there. I’ve been playing with a shiny new HTC Magic for a few weeks now, the G-2 Android phone in the guise of a Google ION developer device, and as part of my explorations I’ve been looking for interesting applications in the Android Market. That’s where I found one of the nicest pieces of mobile software I’ve seen - Google Sky Map.

It’s not surprising that Google has done such a good job with this software, after all, Android is their phone platform, and they should know it (and the reference hardware inside out). The folk in Mountain View also have a huge database of data they can take advantage of - in the shape of Google Earth and all its varied information layers. Where Sky Map differs from most computer based star maps is that it’s live.It then calculates the current view, and displays it. Google is augmenting reality, making it part of its world of search.

On a deeper level it’s actually a specialised version of what Mary calls a “What’s-That”, a device that when pointed at something, well, just does that. It annotates the world with an overlay of information to give us the information we want and need. Phones don’t have the power needed to deliver that level of image recognition, but they do know where you are. Constrain the problem to maps of the heavens, and you’ve got a winner on your hands.

The sky at night can be confusing - with light pollution and high cloud making identification hard. Just being able to point a phone in the right direction to get the names of the objects you can see is an excellent solution to the problem. After all, it’s the most personal of devices and one that’s going to be with us when we most need it.

Then there’s Wikitude, which is a step even further in the direction of the What’s-That, using the device camera and the device sensors to overlay points of interest from geo-coded data in Wikipedia and Qype on the phone screen.

Here it is, letting me know what’s in the world outside a hotel room somewhere in Oregon. There’s still not enough data in the world of public geo-coded information - but what there is is enough to make you want more.

You know, I really like living in the future.

(I’ll go into all the hassles involved in screen-capping Android another time!)

–Simon

Q. How do you get 4000 people to start developing for your mobile platform?

A. Give them all a phone.

No, that’s not a riddle - that’s just what Google did this morning at its IO event here in San Francisco. After a keynote that majored on the future of the web - specifically on HTML 5 - and only touched on some of the features in the upcoming “Donut” release of Android, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra unveiled not just one more thing, but three more things.

The first was the return of the Android Developer Challenge, this time with the added appeal of user votes. I’m not quite sure how The Web’s Got (Developer) Talent would televise, but the folk at Google seem to think that they’ve got the software needed to manage a large scale user driven voting process. Certainly tools like Google Moderator seem to have the user voting process working well - and it’s been heavily stress tested by hosting a White House electronic town hall meeting.

The second was a box that would be given to every attendee at the event, a box that would contain details of the Android SDK.

The third was what else would be in the box: an unlocked Android phone running the 1.5 “Cupcake” release. It was what Gundotra called his “Oprah moment”, not giving away a car, but more than 4000 3G devices with a month’s unlimited data (and a far chunk of voice).

It was quite an impressive giveaway, especially when the phones turned out not to be the familiar G-1, but the new G-2, the HTC Magic, which was unveiled at MWC in Barcelona in February. By the end of the afternoon most of the developers in the conference centre were clutching their boxes, and the 3G bandwidth in and around the Moscone Center was starting to get a little thin…

Of course it’s going to take time to see just how well Google’s bet pays off, but it’s certainly one of the more interesting gambits - and even more interesting considering the tough financial constraints many developers are under. If having a device to test code on is the difference between working with Android and working with Windows Mobile or iPhone, then Android will certainly pick up a hefty new constituency.

I suspect that Google will be watching the number of Android SDK downloads very carefully over the next few weeks…

–Simon

Voice is mobile’s killer app. Secure voice? That’s another story.

Way back in the early days of the GSM specification, the designers came up with a voice cryptography standard, called A. Governments and security agencies  weren’t too happy as they felt that A was too strong - and it would make conversations far too hard to monitor. The result was A5/1, a rather less strong cryptosystem. Whether the over the air path was encrypted or not didn’t really matter - as once your call hit the wired network it was transmitted in the clear.

Not every call can run in the clear.

Some contain significantly price sensitive information - details of a new drug, information about the location of an oil field, negotiations for a merger or an acquisition. It’s information that if it’s lost could cost you, or your business, a lot of money. There’s also no way of quantifying the risk. Then there’s information that could be damaging if it’s intercepted - the details of a divorce settlement, or a bitter custody dispute. You might also be a government employee, trying to keep secrets secret. And finally there’s the issue of the current economic downturn, where very little is certain - apart from the fact that industrial espionage always increases during a recession.

So how do you secure your voice calls?

You could buy a secure cellphone, but it’s not really an economic proposition - it’s expensive to run, the call quality is reltively poor, and there’s lots of lag. More importantly, the phones are large and obvious, so anyone who sees you make a call with one knows you have something to hide.

One alternative is a UK startup, Cellcrypt, which has developed a software voice encryption client that runs on a standard smartphone. We sat down with the CEO, Dr Simon Bransfield-Garth at RIM’s WES event in Orlando to find out more.

There’s a new mantra in the mobile industry: voice is data. Cellcrypt treats it just that way, using IP to connect devices together. The result is a service that’s secure over GPRS, 3G, and WiFi. All of the encryption is in the device, so there’s no reliance on the network - all you need to do is run an application that looks like a standard phone application. Just choose a contact, and the application secures a channel and makes a voice connection between two devices.

The authentication key is set using RSA and 204-bit elliptic curve Diffie Hellman (elliptic curve cryptography gives you a lot of encryption per bit, and is very efficient). Once a session has been authenticated Cellcrypt generates a session key to handle the conversation cryptography, using 256-bit AES wrapped in 256-bit RC4. The whole process is currently being certified for government use by FIPS, and there are plans to go through the UK’s CAPS certification.

One thing to note - there is a server in the cloud to handle call connections and routing, but it doesn’t do any cryptography at all, it just handles the call initiation and licence management. There’s also no central key server, and keys generated from first principles in the phone - giving you a very secure end-to-end environment.

I gave it a try - even in the crowded wireless spectrum of WES the call quality was good. There is some latency, which is only to be expected, and the lower the quality network, the greater the latency. WiFi networks should expect 250ms, 3G, 370ms, and 2G, 500 ms. The business model is based around a service fee of $1K/person/year.

–S