Alas I hear from various sources in the industry that Everything Everywhere is not yet able to support this functionality fully (e.g. It’s completely unavailable on T-Mobile at the moment).

I think that’s a killer, at the moment: You can hardly consider “cross network” to mean everything except T-Mobile. MIG, it seems, jumped the gun!

When cross network voice shortcodes are finally here, though, it’s going to be brilliant. Brands will be able to offer their consumers the ability to call them on a free shortcode that won’t end up costing them £0.70 per minute.

But standby — hopefully we should see full cross network support sometime in this quarter!

I’ve been getting emails from people wondering when the next episode in the Future of Voicemail Series was going live. Tah dah! It’s here. Episode 4 features the co-founder of HulloMail, Andy Munarriz. Andy’s no stranger to Mobile Industry Review — indeed we first interviewed him on camera about two years ago when HulloMail first launched their iPhone application and service.

Having co-founded a company supplying next-generation voicemail services to consumers (and operators), you’d expect Andy to have something to say on the subject. I’m pleased to say you won’t be disappointed. In today’s episode you’ll see Andy talk through his perspective and experience on the background, development and next generation of voicemail services. It’s particularly interesting given HulloMail’s history delivering voicemail services to mobile operators around the world.

I should point out that it’s down to Andy’s generous support (and the rest of the team at HulloMail) that I’ve been able to produce and publish this series in the first place, as HulloMail are the series sponsor. So thank you Andy.

Right then, have a watch and let me know what you think!

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I’ll be posting more on this shortly, but in the meantime, here’s the full release. If you’re into SIP and PBX services, do take some time to read.

Research In Motion Limited today announced BlackBerry® Mobile Voice System 5 (BlackBerry® MVS 5) with voice over Wi-Fi® calling. BlackBerry MVS 5 works with Cisco® Unified Communications Manager to provide a business user with the ability to use their regular desk phone number and extension from their BlackBerry® smartphone. With the new version 5, an employee will be able to use a single work phone number shared between their desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone and make and receive enterprise calls on their BlackBerry smartphone over a Wi-Fi connection, adding to the existing capability available over cellular networks.

An increasingly mobile workforce and the growing number of employees working from home present challenges for businesses to keep their staff accessible through their work phone number and keep calling costs under control. With BlackBerry MVS 5, calls made through BlackBerry MVS are routed through the corporate phone system/Private Branch Exchange (PBX)*, which helps with adherence to company policies and enables potential savings on long-distance and international roaming charges. Employees also benefit from the convenience of a single work phone number shared between their desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone. Employees can be more reachable through their work phone number and can even enjoy the convenience of extension dialing from their BlackBerry smartphone as well as the flexibility to move calls from their BlackBerry smartphone to their desk phone. It’s also easy to use since incoming calls ring simultaneously on the employee’s desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone and employees access BlackBerry MVS using the same phone interface that they are already familiar with on their BlackBerry smartphone.

“BlackBerry Mobile Voice System 5 effectively provides a wireless extension of the corporate phone system to allow voice over Wi-Fi calling at work, public hotspots and home. It presents a great opportunity for companies to enhance the productivity of employees who are often away from their desks or working from home, such as workers in construction, hospitality, sales and professional services,” said Alan Panezic, VP, Platform Product Management at Research In Motion. “This latest release enables businesses to better leverage their investment in the corporate phone system, adapt to the growing demand by employees for more flexible work arrangements, improve workforce productivity and save costs on long-distance and international roaming charges.”

RIM and Cisco have worked closely to integrate BlackBerry MVS 5 with Cisco Unified Communications Manager to deliver an enhanced user experience. The solution has been tested for interoperability and will be supported by both RIM and Cisco.

Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager, Unified Communications Business Unit at Cisco: “BlackBerry Mobile Voice System and Cisco Unified Communications Manager provide and extend Cisco’s IP telephony features to BlackBerry smartphone users at companies of any size. With an integrated Cisco Unified Wireless Network, our customers will be able to have highly secure voice over Wi-Fi experiences and high quality phone calls with their BlackBerry smartphones while roaming across the wireless network.”

Advanced IT features built into BlackBerry MVS 5 will help to provide controlled, managed and secure use of BlackBerry smartphones with the corporate phone system. Key features include:

* Wi-Fi network access controls to set which Wi-Fi networks employees can access
* Network preference settings with the option of prioritizing the use of Wi-Fi or cellular for making phone calls
* Authentication to help ensure that only authorized BlackBerry smartphones have access to the corporate phone system
* Incoming call filtering based on allowed and blocked caller lists

A new interoperability platform has also been added to BlackBerry MVS 5 to enable telecommunications companies to offer BlackBerry MVS 5 as part of their corporate phone system offerings. RIM is working with leading companies to make BlackBerry MVS available for a range of PBX systems.

BlackBerry MVS 5 is expected to be available later this year.

Fund My Phone works slightly differently: it gives you free minutes if you encourage all your Facebook mates to endure some advertising spots. Free-minutes-seekers install the application, tell all their friends about it, and for every four mates that watches a one minute trailer of some sort and gives their feedback, free minutes get sent back to the original user.

In principle, it’s a canny idea but how many of people’s Facebook friends are more than vague acquaintances they added to boost their friends list and make themselves look popular? Asking them to watch some adverts for you should separate the wheat from the chaff and you might even get some free airtime out of it to boot.

The 3G network will be switched on across 20 cities this year including Las Vegas and Los Angeles, with New York being the first to get the third-generation nod, and those hungry to test out the service will have a choice between four 3G handsets.

Given it’s taken T-Mobile ages to get this up and running, if this latest snippet about the switch-on is true, it sounds like madness: according to endaget, T-Mobile will launch its 3G network without data. Yep, 3G will be kept initially for voice, with EDGE acting as data carrier. Without data capabilities, this 3G rollout is looking like a dangerously damp squib.

Sony Ericsson puts the slip down to a “slowing market growth in mid-to-high end phones in markets where Sony Ericsson has a strong presence”. At the same time, the company says it expects all the handsets that it announced previously but will sell in the next quarter will help make a difference in future – like the “high end” Xperia X1 and “high end” Walkman and HSDPA phones. If Sony Ericsson is having trouble shifting high end models and taking a profit hit, perhaps boasting about the slew of high end models coming soon is not the best way to rectify it?

There’s a lot of fluff around the initiative (social networks go mobile – who’d have thought it?), but some potentially interesting work. Here’s what IBM says it will be working on:

Universal Mobile Translator
IBM’s researchers are developing new technology to facilitate speech between individuals who speak no common language with the goal of free-form dialogue facilitated by a PDA. IBM technology is already allowing travelers using PDAs to translate menus in Japanese and doctors to communicate with patients in Spanish. IBM real-time translation technologies will be embedded into mobile phones, handheld devices and cars.

Portable Power in Your Pocket
IBM’s SoulPad software allows PC users to separate a computer’s “soul” — the programs, settings and data it holds — from its body, the disks, keyboard, screen, processor and other hardware from which it is comprised. Once a computer’s soul is stored on a storage device like a portable USB hard drive or iPod with SoulPad software, it can be carried around and reincarnated in any other computer simply by plugging in the storage device and starting the computer up.

Social Networks Go Mobile
Consumers can communicate with their social network friends regardless of where they are with voice and SMS from either a PC or a mobile phone. This is huge for generation Y consumers. For example, young shoppers looking at purchasing clothes in a store are increasingly looking for immediate feedback via their social networks, and the easiest way to make this happen is via mobile devices.

Healthcare Goes Mobile
IBM Research has brought together mobile phones and “presence” technology combined with health records to provide a potential “good samaritan” with information on how to aid people in critical medical situations. This combination of IBM Research capabilities and IBM WebSphere Presence Server exemplifies IBM’s ability to create enhanced mobile applications for everyday life.

Interesting, it also says it’s working on “voice-enabled mobile commerce” – if there ever was an application that should be more developed, it’s speech input, particularly for developing economies. After all, how useful is text input and SMS in countries where there’s an 50 percent illiteracy rate?

Yahoo is obviously rather fond of this technology – it’s also announced that it’s invested in Vlingo as part of a $20 million series B funding round for the company. Vlingo said it will put the money towards expansion and R&D.

Voice is, let’s face it, still the killer app for mobiles so it’s actually surprising there aren’t more people talking up voice-enabled search, especially given the push for mobility in emerging markets where literacy rates may be low. Does anyone know what Google’s up in this area?

The speculation the spectrum will be used for mobile TV rather than voice or data stems from the nature of the spectrum Dish, through a company called Frontier Wireless, bought: the spectrum is suited to video but can’t handly two way communication.

But whether that actually translates to mobile TV remains to be seen. After all, few broadcast mobile TV services are up and running commercially, let alone are bringing in the revenue. Dish so far has refused to comment on its plans for the spectrum. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if there’s more mobile TV on the way.

According to AeroMobile, it’s the first time that voice calls have been allowed on commercial airline flights, after the European Aviation Safety Agency and the United Arab Emirates-based General Civil Aviation Authority gave the system the thumbs-up.

It looks like AeroMobile and Emirates have really done their research here. There’s a second aircraft coming online soon, so the service isn’t just a one-off, BlackBerry email and other GPRS data applications will be available later on this year and there’s even a politeness policy enforced making sure that passengers keep their mobiles on silent. If Emirates get the pricing right, it could be the testbed that proves demand for in-flight mobility.

The appeals come after Ofcom changed the controls on mobile termination rates early last year, which it said at the time would save operators £400 to £500 million a year and that saving should be passed on to retail customers.

According to The Guardian, the operators are now hoping to get termination rates down to nothing in order to be able to offer all-you-can-eat call plans of the type that have become common in the US. If that’s the case, great. If it saves the operators money, that’s great too – as long as the operators remember to send a bit of those savings our way, as Ofcom asked for.