FreeSWITCH on the Nokia N800 - Open Source Telephony in your Pocket

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Thanks to colleague Aaron Huselage, I learned about this, which has garnered very little coverage or conversation that I've seen -

We can run on the N800

Well, one day after announcing the ability to converse with an N800 over mod_dingaling we can now actually *run* freeswitch on the N800.
If you want to try it out here is a binary snapshot: http://www.freeswitch.org/downloads/n800/

For those of you who aren't familiar with FreeSWITCH, here's some background:

FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the callflow.

We support various communication technologies such as SIP, H.323, IAX2 and GoogleTalk making it easy to interface with other open source PBX systems such as sipX, OpenPBX, Bayonne, YATE or Asterisk.

We also support both wide and narrow band codecs making it an ideal solution to bridge legacy devices to the future. The voice channels and the conference bridge module all can operate at 8, 16 or 32 kilohertz and can bridge channels of different rates.

FreeSWITCH runs on several operating systems including Windows, Max OS X, Linux, BSD and Solaris on both 32 and 64 bit platforms.

Our developers are heavily involved in open source and have donated code and other resources to other telephony projects including sipX, Asterisk and OpenPBX.

It's an interesting and very popular solution. The idea of running an open source telephony platform on the Nokia N800 intrigues me. Having used the N800 pretty extensively as part of the Nokia Blogger Relations program, the device, a real Linux workstation, has tremendous potential.

The idea of open source telephony of this scale, in your pocket, sets the stage for some new paradigms in telephony and communications. I'm envisioning the next generation call center, which could be very different powered by N800s insteads of more traditional workstations. A WiFi-powered call center with agents using N800s could become a very fun place to work, and completely disrupt the call center model.

In that light, over the next week or two, I plan on reinitializing my N800 and loading up FreeSWITCH to see how the N800 performs as an open source telephony platform. Anyone interested?