Fring

Some described it as a ballsy move today, when Fring announced the availability of their client on iPhone. The folks at Fring are doing this without Apple’s blessing, using the Jailbreak installer. Are they thumbing their noses at Apple, or just trying to steal a march on the inevitable waves of similar applications that will follow? Only the Fring team know for sure.

Fring lasted only a short time on my iPhone I’m afraid. The thousands of contacts I maintain in my Skype, MSN, and GTalk buddy lists took too long to load. Further, I couldn’t actually dial-out using Skype out. The Fring team characterize this release as a pre-release, and I would have to concur. After a few hours of play, I uninstalled it. Nevertheless I was impressed at both the application itself, and the technical wizardry required make it operate in the background on the iPhone. To my knowledge, no other application has that ability. So I’ll try Fring again, after a future update.

If you have a lighter weight buddy list than I do, and a jailbroken iPhone, you may want to check out Fring. It could be just the thing for someone needing inexpensive calling and a multi-headed IM solution on iPhone.

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We discussed, we debated, and we argued the meaning and pulse of the mobile web. And in the end, as Russell Beattie did, we concluded that the mobile web as it was conceived, is dead. Moore’s law, the lack of common standards, and the indifference of North American carriers have all conspired to kill the mobile web dead. There is no mobile web. There is only the fact that the web is becoming mobile.

We also had a lengthy conversation about Apple’s iPhone SDK, developer programs, and whether or not a “Jailbroken” iphone developer might be penalized by Apple. Fring was the example we talked about, as they have defied Apple and simply gone ahead and built an application for iPhone.

The Economist article on mobile nomads was sadly a casualty of time. We ‘ll discuss it tomorrow instead.