Truphone BB10 is ‘Built for BlackBerry’

We’re very proud to announce that the Truphone app has now officially been approved for the much coveted 'Built for Blackberry' status.

For those who may not know what being ‘Built for BlackBerry’ means, it’s an official acknowledgement that the Truphone App not only adheres to the BlackBerry 10 guidelines but that it also delivers an experience that best shows off what BlackBerry 10 is capable of.

When BlackBerry approve an app as ‘Built for BlackBerry’ it means they recognise it has been designed, developed and polished to provide a brilliant experience for BlackBerry 10 customers. We’re very proud to have met these high quality standards and that BB10 users can so enjoy using the Truphone App to stay better connected with friends. The Truphone app for BB10 is at the cutting edge of VoIP technology, offering everything from cost indicators to audio in full HD!

Of course, the horizon is always moving and we won’t be stopping our regular app updates any time soon. In fact, the next update is due to arrive in just two weeks and will bring a number of updates and enhancements to the Truphone experience!

Not downloaded the app yet? Get it now for BB10, iPhone and Android. You too can start making free calls to your friends in full HD.

 

Truphone App v5.1 has arrived

Given that over 25,000 of you updated to v5.1 of the Truphone app within the first 24 hours of the update going live, it’s likely you already know there’s a new version available. If not though, you’ll be pleased to know that the latest version of the Truphone app offers more than just small tweaks – it debuts some exciting new features too…

• Cost Prediction: Tired of keeping track of tariffs? Now you’ll know how much a call will cost before you make it – and we’ll tell you which calls you can make for free too.

• No Connection Fees: Connection fees aren’t popular with anyone, so we got rid of them. All of them.

• Call Encryption: Worried someone might be listening? Protect your calls with state of the art encryption for peace of mind.

• Lower Rates: Now you can call US mobiles on a data connection from anywhere in the world for just a £0.01p a minute – and that’s just for starters.

• Signal Indicator: Worried about a poor connection? Now you can check how strong your network or Wi-Fi signal is before you dial.

Of course, even with all these new features there’s still room for improvement – which is good because we love new ideas and hearing from customers! So, if you’ve got an idea for how we can improve or you just want to know more about how these features work then let us know in the comments, over Twitter or on Facebook.

And if you’ve yet to download the app, then what are you waiting for? Download it from the iTunes Store or Google Play right away!

The new Tru App is released

On Friday, we finally released v5 of the Tru App on Android and iOS. It may have taken a while, but the early feedback it's receiving is positive.

As with any major release, there have been a few changes along the way, which many people have already noticed and fed back.

What's new - and what's gone?

For starters, it now supports iOS 6 and Jelly Bean and most noticeably it now has a completely new, user friendly design!

We've also stripped back the functionality, focusing on what we do best - namely phone calls and allowing people to stay connected. This means that gone, for now, are IM and SMS functionality. But, you've now got visual voicemail and a reactive voice engine.

If you're new to the Tru App, you'll also find that it's got a streamlined sign-up process - it's fast and very easy to get going.

What's next?

Well, our Labs team are still hard at work on releasing the app on other devices and also a brand new Tru Labs website complete with blogs straight from the developers keyboards! The team is also feverishly developing new features, which will be rolled out over the coming months.

We've been a little too quiet recently, but believe us, there are so many exciting things to come from the App, SIM and network in the very near future – we really can’t wait to tell you!

It's Tru, making calls on the Underground is possible

The days of saying "I would have called, but I was on the Tube" are coming to an end for Londoners.

Until now, London's Underground network was always a black spot, the place you could guarantee to get no data or calls.

But, that has changed. Five Tube stations are now equipped with Virgin Media's new Wifi service, with another 75 planned to be offering it by the end of July.

While this is not particularly ground-breaking or unpredictable, what gets us excited is the possibilities this brings to travellers, especially those who are using our Tru App, as it means that they can now use their phone almost as normal - even when underground.

BlackBerry 10: The developers' advantage?

The key message from Orlando at this years BBWorld conference? BlackBerry 10 is real. It's coming soon. And over the course of the 3-day event, they unveiled the specifics of what it is. At Tru, we've been working with this new platform and the pre-alpha devices for a few weeks now, so I thought it'd be useful for some of you out there if we shared our experiences.

There are a bunch of questions about market, product positioning, and the developer ecosystem that I'll hold off talking about for now. I'll keep this post focussed at the technical level, because that is where it needs to start for BlackBerry 10. If it is not a platform that engages the engineers, then it falls at the first hurdle, in my opinion.

BlackBerry 10 is an evolution of the software that runs on the PlayBook product that has now been out for over a year. The core OS that underpins BB10, and the PlayBook OS, is QNX. This is a Unix variant that was originally built specifically to deliver highly efficient real-time systems. It is widely used in embedded systems, and runs on cars, oil tankers, and plenty of other places. My point here is that it is not untried or new to market.

Because this system is a POSIX compliant unix-like system, its actually pretty easy to get the majority of open source applications out there running on BB10, which is a huge deal. QCC, the QNX compiler, actually has a GCC-compliant mode. Think about that for a moment. All innovation these days is about building on the shoulders of giants, right? I'm sure you've all heard the statement that "there would be no Google without Linux". The fact that this platform has this level of compatibility, means you can really move quickly on this platform, unlike BlackBerry OS predecessors.

There also seems to have been a decision taken pretty early on in the design of BB10: If the OS has an API, the developers have access to it. No hidden APIs, giving the developer complete control. You can think of it as Android without the Dalvik runtime. The main difference being that BB10 OS has a micro-kernel architecture, which in theory offers some advantages in being able to dynamically change the OS without recompiling the kernel. Throw in the pure SMP design and you've got a platform here that gives you the most important ingredient that developers need in order to innovate: Control.

If I could pick one single thing that makes a system attractive to innovative software developers, it's control. Whether it's control over hardware, control in providing quality UIs, or anything in between, you don't want the OS to get in the way of what you're trying to do. At Tru, we've always had to wrestle with previous versions of BB OS, and so when we discovered that we can potentially put our full set of services out for the new platform and have a fairly easy time in porting it, we got really excited.

My background is in network and transport layer communications services, so I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the most qualified person to comment on UI frameworks, but for the proof-of-concept application we built for the BlackBerry World conference, I had to roll my sleeves up and get involved.  

We worked with the new Cascades framework, and I must say it's an interesting choice from RIM. Cascades has merits in that it leverages common paradigms like C++ and the Qt/QML languages and frameworks, so developers will be fairly comfortable adapting to the platform, but its a big jump for some developers to move from the J2ME platform of previous versions of BB OS, and requires the highest cost of all the adoption pain-points in offering a service on BB10 that currently runs on existing versions of the platform.

RIM have also added a WebWorks toolkit for the platform however, so you don't need to step down to C++ if you don't need to, and shows the company are embracing HTML5 and associated standards to allow application development to be high quality, rich in features, and quick to develop on. With these Web technologies, on top of the OS-layer compatibility, you are also closer than ever to being able to maintain a single codebase across multiple platforms in your mobile offerings. 

As for Tru, we're delighted to be able to offer a complete feature set on BlackBerry for the first time, and we're committed to delivering a 1.0 application ready in time for the official BlackBerry 10 launch which, according to Thorsten Heins at BlackBerry World, is going to be sometime later this year.