Twinklephone Review

Twinklephone (or just "Twinkle") is a softphone SIP client for *nix clones such as Linux and FreeBSD. Since I run the latter, I'll concentrate on reviewing for that platform.

It is a straight SIP client; there is no Skype, video or IM support yet, although video and IM are on the wishlist of the developer.

Getting it Running

Having tried Kphone (which worked to a point) and Linphone (which is now broken on FreeBSD due to an incompatibility with libosip2), Twinklephone was a surprising find. Not only did it build easily, but it actually worked first time. In fact, the only thing I had to do to get it going properly was build a SIP proxy on my gateway machine (due to NAT issues which are beyond the scope of this reveiw).

Configuration is very simple, although people with more than one SIP account may have trouble figuring out how to set the default account. The UI is clean, simple and intuitive and, unlike most other SIP clients for *nix that I have tried, it Just Works.

Pros

Integration with KDE's address book (assuming you're using KDE). It's also simple to configure, supports multiple codecs and supports multiple accounts at once.

Cons

As mentioned, there is no video and IM support. Also, as of writing, the application fails to shut down correctly, requiring a kill -9 of its PID to get it to terminate. This may be a problem with QT or KDE on FreeBSD which may not manifest itself on other platforms.

Since this client hasn't reached v1.0 release yet, it certainly has the potential to become the best of the bunch as far as functionality is concerned.

For it's 0.8.1 release point status, it's an excellent start and a relief to actually have a working, easily used client on my desktop. As to why it's called Twinkle I'll make no guesses, but the old axiom of "letting OSS developers name key applications is akin to letting marketing write them" seems to apply


Enjoy to talk with VoIP !