New Microsoft Mobile OS has VoIP built in

At last year's 3GSM World Congress, Skype announce plans to put its service on mobile phones. A month ago, the company essentially said, "Well, maybe not so much." GSM is not the friendliest environment for wireless VoIP; EDGE networks are really too slow to support VoIP, and true 3G GSM networks won't be available for another year or so. But at this year's 3GSM, Microsoft announced the latest version of its mobile operating system, Windows Mobile 6. So what? Although WM6 doesn't have software to allow VoIP calls, the OS includes the plumbing to allow carriers and gadget makers to turn that function on. The rough analogy may be what happened to the Internet when Microsoft included an IP stack in Windows 95. In 1994, not a lot of people (relatively) were online. In 1996, the whole world was. Microsoft doesn't have the impact in the mobile world that it did in the desktop world, but VoIP code in widely deployed PDA software will be, as The Donald says, "yoooge."

For more information about 3GSM:
- read this article from InformationWeek and
- read this article from ComputerWorld