Android smart phones are gaining in popularity and Counterpath has released a new Android VoIP app targeted to those users who want to use their phones as a soft phone to communicate over VoIP. 
This is welcome news because this new sip client meets a real business need for a fully functional VoIP app. The new app is called Bria (same name as the app available for the iPhone).
The first thing you will notice is that the interface for this app is quite different from the Bria soft phone client released for the iPhone. Making calls over 3G networks and Wifi are both possible which allows you to make VoIP calls virtually anywhere. We would recommend purchasing the G729 license which lets you use the more compressed codec for dialing out over 3G networks. The G729 codec can be purchased for $8.99. This will improve call quality over the included G711 codec that ships with Bria. The cost for the Bria VoIP App is $7.99 and can be purchased now from the Android market.
One feature that is unfortunately missing from this sip client is the ability to record phone calls. Bria for the iPhone currently offers this feature but for some reason the Android equivalent seems to be missing it. You can choose whether Bria runs in the background or not and choose whether you want it to run over 3G and/or wifi networks. This app has a voicemail notification which appears on your status bar at the top even when its running in the background.
When we loaded up this VoIP app for the first time we noticed that it immediately allowed us to access all of our contacts. This was a pleasant surprise because the thought of having to re-enter all of those contacts again wasn’t something we wanted to do. We tried making calls over both 3G (with the G729 codec) and Wifi, both worked really well and the call quality was good.
All of the standard business phone features that you would expect are available with the Bria VoIP app including conference calling, transfer, hold etc. For instance when we put someone on hold the person on the other end of the call heard our music on hold. Transferring calls and using the conference calling feature was smooth and easy to understand. This app has a speakerphone which works great but of course this was a feature that we would have expected to see. We have to hand it to Counterpath for releasing a truly great VoIP App for the Android smart phone user crowd.
To use this app with your Easy Office Phone hosted pbx account just plug in your SIP credentials into the settings section and away you go.
