Acrobits SoftphoneLast week, Ronnie and I were testing out various softphone solutions for our IP based phone system. After some research, looking at the features, reviews and number of updates to the app, we picked the Acrobits Softphone (aff link). Ronnie did his review of the softphone iPhone app in a new weekly series of blog posts at the RustyBrick Blog.

On Thursday night, for fun, I decided to call some people as if I was in the office.

Let me step back a bit. Since we use an Asterisk based IP-based PBX provided by Fonality (which I am still very happy with after 4+ years), we can use softphones from anywhere in the world with our PBX. So when I go to Seattle next week and want to get on conference calls or tell someone to call me in the office, I can. I don't have to give out my cell phone number, I don't have to forward my phone calls, all I have to do is open the iPhone app and it will start receiving phone calls as if I am at my phone at my desk.

So to have some fun, I made some phone calls last week. I called my mother at about 10pm one night and the first thing she said was "you're still at your office?" I said, "yea" but eventually came clean after laughing. I called a few more people who said the sound quality was pretty good, at worse, it sounded like I was on a speaker phone.

Sound quality has little to do with the app and more to do with the broadband available both on my iPhone and in the office. Making the calls from my home over Verizon FiOS was no problem at all. The office's connection wasn't great, but it was fine - all the calls via this SIP protocol go over the T1. Cable blocks them, unless it is through their own phone system.

But when I tried to make phone calls over AT&T's 3G connection, the sound quality was horrible. Again, not an issue with the app but more of an issue with 3G just not being strong enough to handle a solid phone call.

There are some free SIP iPhone apps you can play with, but this app seems to be updated frequently and have some nice features.

Make sure to check out Ronnie's review on the RustyBrick Blog.