A few of us gathered in a conference room today to have a chat with Brent Kelly – an expert in our space – who was among the first batch of analysts to try the DiVitas Networks hosted solution project.

To put it mildly, we like what we heard.

One of our strongest points of feedback from analysts has been in the area of voice quality while in WiFi. (The DiVitas voice quality is enabled by the DiVitas Voice Engine.)

Kelly was on board with recent blogs in which his colleagues (the other testing analysts) assessed our voice quality saying, “The voice quality was fantastic when running on WiFi. It is much better than the cellular coverage inside my office from either Verizon or AT&T.”

Kelly had only a brief opportunity to test the seamless roaming between WiFi and cellular before heading off to VoiceCon Amsterdam. But he said that the device did seamlessly roaming, and handed off between networks, as advertised. And he didn’t drop his call. He was also able to place calls and use Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence during his business travels in Europe.

There were several productivity features unique to world of mobile VoIP that were the focus of Kelly’s brief stint playing with the DiVitas phone.

“I like that IMs and messages show up right there on my phone. Single message store is a fantastic feature,” Kelly said. “I also liked the fact that I could click-to-call using my contact list to easily engage someone in communication,” he said. “Also, I could use Presence to change how people contacted me. I could go offline, or say “unavailable” if didn’t want anybody to contact me … or I could display “in a meeting” and indicate that I am available by text-only. That is an extremely handy tool.”

In fact, according to Kelly, Presence is the cornerstone to any Unified Communications (UC) or Mobile UC solution.

“When I talk about UC, it is critical that it’s Presence-based. A lot of other technology can be there as well, but Presence is fundamental,” said Kelly. 

Another critical piece of a UC solution, he said, is having a Unified Interface, i.e. the DiVitas GUI, for accessing each of the phone’s messaging capabilities.

According to Kelly, he’d like to see federating (interoperability) between the DiVitas IM and other mainstream IM tools used in everyday business. (note: this is a feature slated for an upcoming version of the DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications software).

And although we can’t take credit for this favorable comment (kudos goes to Nokia and the E71 phone running the DiVitas Client), we will share the feedback nonetheless. “The E71 was an awesome phone. I loved the keyboard.”

“DiVitas worked flawlessly for me and this test-run really gave me a flavor for how the product works. DiVitas is definitely a product that I could recommend to people looking for a Mobile Unified Communications solution,” he said.