Is 'Gizmo Project' Nokia's answer?

Nokia has been listening to its customers and the word on the street - and is now pushing the frontiers of Internet phone calling with The Gizmo Project...

Nokia Corporation, announced last week of a download that will install Gizmo VoIP—a plug-in adaptation of SIPphone Inc.'s Gizmo Project softphone—on its N80 Internet Edition smartphone. The Wi-Fi-enabled N80ie is optimized for VoIP using standards-based SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) signaling. The Gizmo VoIP plug-in is the first IP telephony module to be integrated into the Nokia platform.

"Our collaboration with SIPphone makes Internet calling easy, plus our open VoIP platform allows for any SIP-based VoIP provider to incorporate their services in our device architecture, giving consumers the best of the Internet world," said, Nokia Vice President, Multimedia, Ralph Eric Kunz.

"Collaborating with Nokia has allowed our development teams to create a compelling VoIP experience on the N80 Internet Edition and instantly enable millions of mobile consumers around the world to save money," said Michael Robertson, Chairman and CEO of SIPphone.

For users of PC-based Gizmo clients, the Nokia N80 integration provides a mobile option that cuts them loose from the PC and lets them talk to their Gizmo contacts for free—anywhere there's a Wi-Fi connection. But the problem is that this $500 smartphone is not sold in the US (yet!).

I know that all Nokia phones come bundled with their own VoIP application. There may be different incarnations of these apps, but this move tells me that their built-in VoIP apps are not as good as they'd like it to be.

The mobile VoIP space is an interesting one to watch right now.

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India's cellphone users to reach 278 million by 2010

Analysts expect India's user base to rise to 278 million by 2010 as the low call rates lure customers. At 93 million, now it exceeds the combined population of Germany and Belgium (via Reuters/Yahoo).

India's domestic market, forecast to grow to $5.8 billion by 2010, is expected to consume about 55 million handsets this year, up 71 percent from 2005. Between 4 million and 5 million new users are coming into the market each month, attracted to the world's cheapest local mobile call rates of as low as 2 U.S. cents a minute.

There is still room for growth as mobile ownership is just 9 percent in India where the population is more than a billion and networks, even though they are expanding rapidly, are still largely city centric.

Nokia, which controls nearly half the $2.5 billion Indian handset market, and its suppliers are investing about $150 million in its Chennai unit, which makes a few million handsets a month and has already exported phones to south east Asian nations like Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand.

More than 40 percent of the software that goes into Motorola RAZR handset is developed in its Indian R&D facility.

South Korean LG Electronics operates a plant in the western city of Pune that will churn out 20 million GSM and CDMA handsets by 2010, roughly half of which are earmarked for export.