Truphone Wins Best For iPhone, Where Are The Others?

The London Times has named Truphone, the “BEST (MOBILE VOIP) FOR THE IPHONE” Beating out other Mobile VoiP services such as Skype, Coms.net, NimBuzz and fring. Our own Cory Andrews reviewed the Truphone for iPhone application when it first hit the streets and while he had a bit of difficulty getting it to work at first, he reported that the application worked as advertised.

What I find most interesting about this article is not the fact that Truphone is a great service for the iPhone (it is), but the fact that there are not any other Mobile VoIP service applications out there challenging Truphone in the iPhone VoIP space is surprising. Sure there are a lot of Mobile VoIP applications for a jailbroke iPhone or Mobile VoIP applications that you can access via the iPhone’s web browser, but upon checking today, the Truphone application is the only iPhone VoIP application available through the iPhone Application store.

Demand for Mobile VoIP applications is surely in it’s infancy, however, there is enough demand for the service to warrant competition, especially with the iPhone gaining in popularity amongst business users.

Part of the lack of official iPhone VoIP applications could also stem from the fact that the heaviest areas of usage for Mobile VoIP services are also the places where the iPhone is not yet available (or popular). Another reason may also have to do with carrier politics. Apple was quick to make sure that offical VoIP applications only worked over the phones WiFi capabilities (and not via 3G), so could the limited number of iPhone VoIP applications be a way handling the carriers interests?

Something tells me I won’t ever “officially” know for sure, but for now I’ll stick to speculating and using Truphone on my iPhone to make all of my international calls.