HOP-ON Unveils Its $39 Carrier Grade Wi-Fi Phone

The HOP1502 handset provides all the features and functionality of a VoIP terminal adapter but has the advantage of enabling users to talk from any available public or private Wi-Fi access point..

According to market research firm Instat, “The number of mobile/WLAN (VOIP) subscribers is to reach over 256 million worldwide by 2009. By 2009, the numbers of subscribers using WLAN for voice is expected to exceed those using WLAN for data only.”

I highly doubt that VOIP is going to win out over the cell networks in terms of mass adoption. But I do think if there’s a killer app to be created that merge voices and data in innovative ways, it’s may well be more likely to occur initially in the VOIP space than in the cellular phone space.

In biology, evolution occurs most quickly when a population is isolated and undergoes environmental stress.

By analogy, the evolution of the killer voice-data app is more likely to occur in the mobile VOIP space, free of the fetters of the carriers. Consider:

• VOIP customers are a small subpopulation of early adopters likely to try new things.
• the companies that serve them are under competitive stress to differentiate themselves from each other and the cellular companies.
• the barrier to entry to becoming a VOIP carrier is much lower than becoming a cellular carriers, so competition is more intense.
• the underlying VOIP technology is inherently more open and friendly to integrated voice-data applications.

I have no idea what the killer voice-data app will be, but it is likely to be an application that drives billable minutes, that has viral and community aspects, and that is accessible from any telephone while providing providing the best experience on a phone with data support. Once such an app establishes itself in the VOIP playground, it can leap to the much larger cellphone population from a position of stength relative to the carriers.

A while black Alan Steele blogged about Dodgeball, which sounded like it was trying to create such a killer app. Google bought them, so there’s must have been something good there; I’m going to give it a try. I am somewhat skeptical, however, whether a purely SMS based experience like Dodgeball could be rich enough. Voice should be the lowest common denominator, not SMS.

Fun space, please comment if you know of any interesting voice-data apps.