[VoiceOps] Opinions on best iPhone SIP client?

[Chris Boyd]

> On Feb 18, 2016, at 1:35 PM, Carlos Alvarez <caalvarez at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Those are good clear objectives.  Let me give you my perspective and experience on trying this with a few dozen people...
> 
> The cost of hard phones has come down a lot.  When I last looked at the softphone route, they were more than double today's cost.  Most of our customers deploy the GXP-2130 as their mainstream phone, and it's downright cheap ($70).  The cost of a softphone varies, but you're eating a significant portion of that price anyway with some of them.
> 
> Mobility is half-solved with cell phone forwarding.  Where it falls short is on things like showing your work CLID when calling out, or simple extension dialing.  Presence is actually more complicated in some ways with mobile softphones.
> 
> Battery life is really strained with a softphone running all the time.  And we saw wild variations where a phone might die in two hours one time, then last all day another.  Randomly, people would report the phone being so hot it shut down.
> 
> When sitting at a desk, the facilities of a physical phone are preferable to nearly everyone over a small phone.  Big buttons, a nice handset that cradles better than a cell phone, a wired headset, etc.
> 
> Overall most people were happier with the simple integration of a desk phone and cell forwarding.  The softphones were abandoned.  I'll couch that within the fact that this was a small sample of people in only two companies.

Interesting point about forwarding.  In our specific case, we don’t want to forward calls to cell phones since many of our people travel overseas.  We’d only run the softphone when in the office, and probably won’t be doing VPN unless the user needs to call back into north america.

—Chris