Polycom RealPresence Mobile: Follow-up

A couple of weeks ago I was trying the RealPresence Mobile app from Polycom. I was trying it on my iPad since none of my various Android devices were officially supported.

JMR left a comment on the post saying that he had just installed the Android release on his Nexus 7. Since the Nexus 7 is my preferred tablet I decided that I’d give it a try on that device as well.

Happily, the app seems to work pretty well on the Nexus 7. I registered it with my OnSIP account from which point it could call my Polycom VVX phones. Next I used it to call a Polycom RMX 2000 video conference bridge.  That also worked nicely.

Buoyed by the experience with RealPresence Mobile for Android on the Nexus 7, I decided to try it on my Nexus 4 as well. The Nexus 4 has the advantage of being about to connect to my Wifi or T-Mobile’s HSPA+ quasi-4G network. That means that its pretty easy to overcome any NAT issues. Just abandon the Wifi for the 4G, presuming of course that your data plan can take the traffic.

Further, the RealPresence app has a setting that defines data rate used on Wifi, the default is 512k, and a separate setting for 3G/4G that defaults to 256k.

Just like on iOS RealPresence Mobile seems quite capable. It handles both H.322 and SIP connectivity. It also has the nice in-calls statistics presentation.

I did notice one unexpected thing about RealPresense Mobile for Android…it doesn’t support G.722. My attempt to call the ZipDX wideband demo at sip:wbdemo@conf.zipdx.com met with an unexpected response. The system at the far-end informed me that the connection was in narrowband.

My earlier calls had been to Polycom VVX devices and video conference bridges. In those cases the RealPresence Mobile application used G.722.1C. I had somewhat expected that the app would also support the baseline G.722 codec.