There is no such thing as the perfect mobile phone — and there probably never will be for two reasons.

First, as in all else, what is right for one may not be — and in the cell phone world, probably isn’t — right for another. Second, trying to balance functionality and portability necessitates ideal-busting compromise on the part of mobile phone manufacturers.

I’ll list my off-the-cufff requirements for the cell phone I want to carry permanently, and you’ll see both these limiting reasons come to play:

• GSM and not locked to a single provider;
• Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G, USB connectivity;
• Full QWERTY keyboard;
• Small and light so that the right front pocket of my Levis survive six months;
• A camera that takes real pictures without the grain (this, of course, is a must for parents of small, and therefore unpredictably photogenic, children);
• Full cross-platform syncing capability;
• A full SIP stack that allows VoIP calling over wireless networks.

This phone does not — and never will — exist.

But Nokia is coming close — very close.

I’ve been alternating between two of the ceaselessly innovating Finnish company’s new-generation mobile phone products lately: the E61, which is unfortunately not widely available in North America due to mobile service carrier shortsightedness, and the more recently released (and more readily available) N80 Internet Edition (or N80i, which is different from the N80 that has been available but includes no VoIP support).

Between the two, you have something close to cell phone nirvana. Each individually — though at the top-of-the-mobile-heap — comes up a bit short.

I’ve gone through about a dozen phones in the past three years. Almost all of them are Nokia, in no small measure because my friend Dameon Welch-Abernathy, who works for the company and is an enthusiastic (and knowledgeable) fanboy for the Helsinki home team products, manages to convince me each time I am looking to change.

Of all of them, the E61 and N80 are the best.

I’ve been carrying the E61 around with me since September. It looks just like the E62 offered by Cingular in the U.S., but, unlike Cingular’s brain-dead model, comes with full WiFi and SIP capability built in. The mobile phone industry has been predicting the release of a so-called “Blackberry-killer” for years, and the E61 could be it. It’s sleek, powerful, includes a great keyboard for small thumbs like mine, and, unlike any of RIM’s offerings, includes a SIP stack and is actually relatively dependable as a cell phone (Blackberry’s abysmal cell phone killed the deal for me).

Nokia N61

I used the E61 constantly. I have made and received hundreds of calls through various VoIP channels. including the outstanding Truphone service, and Voxilla’s Communigate Pro and Asterisk telephone servers (relatively easy to set up by consulting Martin Dindos’ excellent “how-to”). For email and instant messaging, there is no better mobile than the E61 on the market.

But . . .

The E61 is just a bit too big in my pocket. It’s WiFi range comes up short, too often losing SIP registration (not unlike an on-the-road dead-spot over a cell). The phone has no camera (a feature that, just a couple of years ago, seemed superfluous but has nearly become as indispensable as an ATM card). As a Mac user, the device’s shortcomings in OSX connectivity (no SMS access, for example) are bothersome. And, even more annoying, the phone’s left-side voice recording buttons become engaged at even the slightest pressure, leaving my phone with dozens of recordings “requested” by the fabric of my pants’ pocket.

If you can live without thumb-tip QWERTY (increasingly hard for me to do), the N80 is a significant improvement.

It’s a bit thicker than many of the less-capable mobiles available, but fits comfortably in my jeans. It’s easy-to-use 3-megapixel camera fits my non-pro needs well. It doesn’t come with oddly placed buttons that mysteriously turn themselves on. And its WiFi range (802.11g. Really!) is outstanding (I’ve yet to lose registration through my home router once, even in the downstairs hillside dungeon that serves as home-office).

Nokia N80

Martin’s instructions for the Nokia E-series and asterisk apply to the N80 as well, and, though definitely cumbersome without the aid of a full keyboard like the E61’s, establishing connectivity is manageable.

Signing up with Truphone (currently in beta) could not be easier: send an SMS with the word “TRU”, wait a second for a reply SMS containing a clickable installation URL. You’re done. The phone also comes pre-installed with an applet that similarly facilitates registration with Gizmo Project’s SIP service.

Dreaming is easy and I’ve come up with two improvements for both the E61 and N80:

• These are both WiFi phones, so, when on a network, you would think you can easily manage settings over a web browser, right? No. Adding a small web server to the phones would allow it, and save countless people countless configuration hours. Ideally, one would establish a WiFi connection via the phones’ keypad and all other settings would be configurable on the browser (much like a VoIP telephone device is configured).
• Give us more universal peripheral connectivity. Nokia’s monstrous “pop-port” connector makes it very difficult to use, for example, a headset other than one manufactured by Nokia. This is a serious limitation because the lesser-quality stereo ear-plug/mic combo that comes with the phone is uncomfortable and makes for difficult conversations. How hard is it to include a standard 3.5 mm headset jack? Please do so.

But these are just nits. The more important matter here is that, finally, at least one cell phone manufacturer is coming to grips with the fact that the future of communications blends the mobile and the IP worlds. For the most part, Nokia is getting it right. And it’s probably only a matter of time before the other manufacturers — and even intransigents like Cingular and Verizon — are forced to jump in.

As the father of a six year-old, I am currently wired to join in any game, participate in any role-play, or accede to any request that I drop whatever I am doing and have a little fun, whenever such might come my way. Since Carolyn Schuk made me it in a game of Blog Tag yesterday — a little diversion brought to the IP Communications blogosphere over the weekend by Jeff Pulver — I’ll bite.

The nature of these viral things is that they tend to waft and warp a bit from their original forms, so if my participation varies from the rules and parameters set forth by Mr. Pulver, I feel confident of being excused.

Five things one might not know about me before arriving at the cocktail party:

1. I am blind in my left eye, having lost it to a ruptured vitreous membrane in a bar-fight in 1992. After three heroic surgical attempts to save my sight by renowned Bay Area eye-doc Richard MacDonald (who my friends and I dubbed Air Mac at the time), I threw in the towel. Now you could strip naked right next to me on my left side and I wouldn’t even notice.

2. I was adopted at the age of one week and raised by wharf rats on the banks of the Mississippi River. Not really. I was actually raised by loving human parents in Memphis, Tennessee, which is not the same at all, but close. To the river, that is. I found and met my birth parents at the age of 35. My father was the youngest of eleven children born to a working-class Irish family in Philadelphia; my mother was a sixteen year-old immigrant from Lithuania. After I met him, my father swore to me she looked eighteen at the time. All I can say now, having seen the pictures, is: she was in fact a hottie, and (given the courses of their lives subsequent to my birth in August 1960) they made a great decision to put me up for adoption. I’ve been lucky from Day One (or Week One), apparently.

3. I am a writer/songsinger who has produced two full-length records of original music and I have performed live with bands on three continents.

4. I was alone for half an hour in the sauna at Trump Palace in Atlantic City with Joe Dimaggio at Muhammed Ali’s birthday party in 1988. It was actually a serendipitous moment, because my adoptive father had recently passed away, and he and the Yankee Clipper had been running buds in New York back in the day. So I had a reason to strike up a conversation with Mr. Dimaggio, and we ended up having a pleasant chat.

5. For my birthday one year, Paulina Porizkova showed me some secrets of runway modeling in her kitchen in New York City.

I’ll tag PhoneBoy, Paul Burke, and Jeseppi Trade Wildfeather — You’re it, boys!

PhoneGnome offers several ways to make free calls, including using non-PhoneGnome devices.

As an example, I don’t have a landline at home and can use PhoneGnome, a SPA942, and my cell phone. The solution is a good fit for longer calls, when holding a cell phone would be uncomfortable and use too many air-time minutes.

Configuring a non-PhoneGnome device was a manual process, until now. With the help of Dameon Welch-Abernathy, aka “PhoneBoy“, the Voxilla Device Configuration Wizards now include support for PhoneGnome.

Simply select PhoneGnome as the Service Provider when stepping through the wizard and supply the SoftGnome SIP credentials.

The SoftGnome SIP credentials are found in My PhoneGnome Features -> SoftGnome Remote Access -> Edit -> View SIP Credentials.

The Voxilla Device Configuration Wizard won’t convert the device into a full-featured PhoneGnome Box, but it will allow the device to make and receive calls using PhoneGnome as the service provider.

For the full set of PhoneGnome features, there is the PhoneGnome Box or PhoneGnome has an upgrade tool for the Linksys SPA3000 (soon to be End-of-Lifed by Linksys).

A column I wrote here caused a bit of a stir over the past few days.

Here’s a brief recap:

Andy Abramson opined that Fonality, a Southern California-based developer of PBXes built on top of the open-source Asterisk PBX, is “better poised” to move Asterisk into the large enterprise world than Digium, the Alabama-based company that developed and maintains Asterisk.

I wrote that it’s hard to disagree with that assessment because Fonality does “an exceptional job of marketing” and I don’t predict well. But I expressed concerns about security issues inherently related to Fonality’s approach, which puts much of the product’s front-end functionality on Fonality’s servers, requiring a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection between the customer’s premises and Fonality in order to access much of that functionality.

There’s no question that Fonality’s approach makes Asterisk easier to install and use, but the trade-offs related to security — namely, that, in most office networks (specifically, those that do not put the PBX on a separate subnet) the solution requires a potentially risky VPN connection back to Fonality, and that Fonality has access to call detail records and chat logs that a business may want to keep secret.

In fairness, there are two things I should correct from my initial post:

First, I wrote that “all chats are logged by the central server. Any sensitive IM information within and outside the office through the local box is available to Fonality.” This is not technically correct. Chats are logged on the local premises computer. However, such logs are accessible, therefore available, to Fonality through the VPN.

Second, I regret writing that “. . . Digium doesn’t require an outside computer to be listening in . . . ” Though not written with that intent, I can see how this can be construed as implying that Fonality has access to actual phone conversations, which it does not.

These two slight corrections notwithstanding, I stand by the conclusion that “Fonality may very well be a good solution for some businesses. But those concerned about keeping company secrets are probably better served by Digium’s offering.”

The issues raised in the mini-uproar that followed my column, can be summarized as follows:

1. The Voxilla Store carries “a number of PBXs, none of which are from Fonality.” (Fonality CEO Chris Lyman on VoIPSupply’s Garrett Smith’s blog, also reprinted in entirety in the comments section of my original post.).

2. A Fonality customer can disconnect and reconnect the VPN at will (Lyman on Smith’s blog).

3. “[E]very phone company in the world” keeps call detail records (CDRs) (Lyman on Smith’s blog).

4. Fonality needs the call detail records because the company’s “high-end reporting functionality,” if run on underpowered customer premises computers, “would spike those CPUs into a coma, effecting audio quality. Remember, these premise boxes are designed to pass great audio, not crunch thousands of call records in under a second.” (Lyman on Smith’s blog);

5. The differences between Fonality’s products and a stock Asterisk installation is that Fonality is a partially hosted solution. “All hosted services have to deal with the issues raised by Marcelo . . . ” but “[m]ost premises based services don’t have all the benefits hosted models offer, and may be less cost effective, but deliver greater control of customer data.” (Alec Saunders). Along similar lines, Dameon Welch-Abernathy wrote that “as an IT person, it is your job to do your ‘due diligence’ to find out exactly how any software you deploy might ‘phone home’ or do anything you don’t like.”

There were a few others, but ultimately void of original material: I sell Fonality and disagree with “with most of what Marcelo had to say” because I agree with Lyman. (VoIPSupply’s Garret Smith). And Marcelo’s portrayal is “inaccurate . . . [but] I’m going to stay out of that battle” and point you to Chris Lyman’s point-by-point rebuttal to Marcelo’s assertions.” (Tom Keating, in a fawning review of Fonality’s most recent offering, PBXtra Professional Edition).

As they don’t add much to the discourse, I’ll pass on Smith and Keating. I will take a stab at the others.

1. The Voxilla Store carries an internet communications server (email, IM, contacts, calendar and PBX) developed by Communigate Systems. The Voxilla Store also carries the Linksys SPA9000, a PBX-key system hybrid limited to a maximum of 16 extensions that does not include voice mail capability. Neither of these products is based on Asterisk, and the Voxilla Store does not carry a single item from Digium. The point of my column was that Digium may present a more secure option to business than Fonality. Pointing out that we carry other PBXes on the Voxilla Store is a thinly veiled accusation of self-interested bias, even though Voxilla has nothing to gain when I compare two products we do not carry .

2. Of course, as Lyman writes, a Fonality customer can shut down the VPN, enabling it only when a PBX configuration change is needed. Such steps add a layer of complexity and essentially cripple much of Fonality’s usefulness. And they do not eliminate the security issues raised. A VPN connection is still required to make configuration changes, which then opens up the on-premises computer (call logs, chat logs, etc.) and the network within which it resides. And whenever the VPN connects the local network to Fonality’s, the local network is only as secure as Fonality’s. For some businesses, this may not be an issue, but I suspect that, for many, it’s an important consideration.

3. Yes, phone companies keep call detail records, but Fonality is a PBX company, not a phone company. When I make a cell phone call over the Cingular network, I am aware that Cingular is keeping a record of that call. But phone companies like Cingular (and AT&T, Verizon, etc.) are regulated, both at the federal and state levels. A PBX company is not regulated. The only protection a Fonality customer has is the company’s rather weak Privacy Policy. It states: “records may be viewed if required so by law, or if there is a suspected Terms of Use violation.” Only Fonality, not its customers, determine if there is a “suspected Terms of Use violation.”

4. The argument that Fonality needs to keep CDRs on its servers because on-premise computers are potentially too underpowered to parse them is just false. A record for a single call on an Asterisk PBX is about 200 bytes in length. In its press releases, Fonality claims the company currently services 1,300 customers with a total of 18,000 users. That’s an average of about 14 users per installation. Let’s exaggerate and say that, on average, each of those users makes and takes 1,000 calls (or about 40 a day). For any given month, then, the total size of the call detail logs for an average Fonality customer is about 7 megabytes, which any computer manufactured in the past 5 years can search and output results from in milliseconds.

5. In essence, Saunders and Welch-Abernathy are suggesting the same thing I originally wrote, though Saunders considers himself “an unabashed fan of hosted models.” As I wrote, and Saunders reiterated, the hosted approach has some advantages, including “ease of use.” But it does come with trade-offs.

I pointed out those trade-offs, Fonality CEO Chris Lyman chose to respond by asserting that what I wrote is “inaccurate” (and, on one count — in relation to where chat logs are stored — he is technically correct, though the security concern I raised still exists).

In the end, Lyman’s argument can be boiled down to this: What we do is no different than what the phone company does and “Fonality’s employees pride themselves on their ethics and it is an important part of our corporate culture.”

I have no reason to question Fonality’s ethics and nothing I wrote was meant to besmirch either Lyman or his employees. But Fonality’s offering is, in its very essence, a hosted PBX. In as much, it comes with certain risks that a business deciding between Fonality’s version of Asterisk and Digium’s version of Asterisk should be aware of.

This is probably a futile attempt to prevent a flood of discontent with a pinkie’s worth of words, but I’ll try anyway.

The so-called VoIP Blogosphere, which is rapidly moving from a mutual admiration society to a constantly-mention-each-other-in-order-to-jointly-grow-our-Google-dollars society, has grown enough to actually have an impact on the success of new products.

It looks, from posts from a number of sources in the past day or so, that the latest target of the chummy “me too” nay-sayers is GrandCentral (GC), a product that launched, in clearly marked “beta” form, three days ago.

The attacks are undeserved.

Carolyn Schuk wrote more extensively of GrandCentral here, so I’ll just describe the basic idea behind the brainchild of former Dialpad execs Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet: Get a phone number and use it as a sort of hub for all your phone services. Give your GC number to anyone you want, and when a call is made to you, the service will find you wherever you tell it to (your home phone, your cell, your work phone, your weekly meeting of the “Getting Things Done” support group, wherever). If you don’t answer, the call goes to a single voice mail account, stored on GC’s servers.

It’s a simple but powerful idea aimed at people with too many phone services, too many numbers and, for me most importantly, too many voice mail depots to keep track of.

Some of the criticisms — minor glitches when GrandCentral.com is viewed in Firefox, a clumsy address book import feature — can easily be dismissed as typical of a beta offering . . . and just as easily fixed in new releases.

The nay-sayers main beef is that they don’t need another phone number. I have 9, wrote Ken Camp. I have even more, Dameon Welch-Abernathy followed.

Perhaps GrandCentral is nothing special to people who collect phone numbers (for reasons that escape me) and have little trouble wading through an Asterisk conf file to make some sense of a mess of their own making.

For those of us who have trouble remembering our three numbers (home, cell and work), and find it annoying to check for voice mail at all three, being able to easily combine all our numbers into one is quite nifty.

And some of GrandCentral’s other features are definitely innovative. The ability to annotate voice mail messages for later referral, for example, is something I am finding very useful, and something that is not available with any other service (why not?). A single-click to mark a call as “spam,” an elegant method to record individualized outgoing greetings, and easily made customized outgoing ring tones are all interesting features.

The keyboard-armed critics of GrandCentral say they have too many numbers already. They probably also have too many telephone devices that they have played with and thrown in the their closets after 15 minutes. And they have 15 softphone clients installed on their computers, and about 8 different methods to make video calls.

I would want a simpler life too. That’s what Walker and Paquet are offering with GrandCentral. Let’s hope the bloggers don’t kill their efforts before they get it out of beta.