Disruptive Telephony

A colleague pointed me to this Engadget story (which, in turn, points to this BBC article) about the fact that BT will soon be allowing UK owners of Sony PSP game consoles to use their PSP to make voice and video calls to other PSP users and eventually to any other phone number.  Per the BBC article (which also includes a nice little video showing this in action)

The software has been developed by BT and will eventually allow PSP users to call PCs, fixed lines and mobiles.

Initially the service will only be available in the UK and will only work on home or BT wireless hotspots.

Currently, there are around 2,000 of these situated in airports, railway stations, hotels and fast food restaurants.

Interesting move by BT.  The cameras were apparently to be available from Sony May 25th but this service from BT will not be available until more details are announced at a conference in August.  Certainly there's a strong potential user base there:

More than 24 million PSPs have been sold around the world, with more than eight million of those sold in Europe.

And the article states that BT says that this software will be distributed to telecom companies in 100 other countries (for, one would imagine, some type of licensing fee), so it will be interesting to see how many of those PSPs actually do turn into VoIP endpoints.