Linux Soft Phone Roundup
SFLphone
SFLphone Startup Window
I had never heard of SFLphone until earlier this week. It is in part what prompted me to write this roundup.
Let me start off by stating that my first impressions of it were not at all positive. The version in Ubuntu's repository is not very stable and would crash often. The latest release version from Launchpad (v0.9.10) was also not stable, it would crash when I minimized it to the system tray. The version that released a few days ago, v0.9.11, would also crash when minimized. The rest of the application showed enough promise, though, that I installed the latest snapshot repository and got a daily build. I'm glad I didn't dismiss it out of hand. The snapshot that I'm running now from November 10th doesn't crash and seems to work pretty well.
As you can see from the screenshot, it meets my requirement of being compact when active, and can even be just a bit smaller. Just about any keystroke in this mode will take the phone "off the hook" and initiate dialing, which means that I can use my numeric keypad to dial numbers without having to click into a text box first.
SFLphone also has the ability to use global hot keys. So far, its the only one of the soft phones that allows this. Hot keys can be assigned globally for: pickUp, hangUp, togglePickupHangup, popupWindow, toggleHold. Not an extensive list, but far better than the rest gave.
It has two options for audio also, Pulseaudio or ALSA. I used ALSA, and used the dmix/snoop plugin, which hooks into Pulseaudio. Using Pulseaudio tools to pick the sound device per application is a royal pain, so using this plugin gives me the ability to ring the main speakers on an inbound call, but use the headset for microphone and phone output. Best of both worlds there.
It (and all the others) are missing multiple audio profiles, however. As far as audio goes, soft phones should have the ability to have at least two profiles, Speakerphone and Handset. In my environment Speakerphone would be the main sound card's speakers and microphone (or the microphone on my webcam) and Handset would be my USB headset. A different global hot key could then be used for answering a call with the speakerphone or handset, much like hard SIP phones do now.
It doesn't yet support video, but that is the short term goal of the SFLphone project right now. They claim there will be a video release within the next few months. I must say I'm looking forward to it. I don't make too many video calls, but it would be nice to complete the feature set.
SFLphone also stays out the of way when its not in use. It sits in the tray and when a call comes in it changes the icon. It also sends a Gnome notification message telling me that there is an inbound call, from what number and on which account. The notification messages don't steal focus, but are enough visually to get my attention beyond a status icon change. With the global hotkeys, I can pick up a call using only the keyboard, in my case, I've assigned togglePickupHangup to Ctrl-F12 which is far easier than using the mouse, all while not stealing the focus of the application I'm in. This feature alone is a huge plus for SFLphone.
SFLphone also has pretty good NAT support and does support STUN on a per SIP account basis. It also has a good range of codecs to choose from including PCMU/A, GSM, G722, speex and celt. I hope their video codec selection is as complete.
Now, SFLphone is not all great. In fact there are a few major problems with it. First is its not that stable. I've only been using it for a few days now and have the UI freeze up on me at least five times. The call is still maintained via the daemon process it uses to handle it, but once the call is done, I have to manually kill off both the daemon and the UI processes and restart them.
It claims to integrate with the Evolution address book as well, but since I don't use Evolution I've not been able to test that aspect of it. I do know that when I had that option enabled, it crashed on me regularly because it wasn't able to do the lookup. It would just vanish from my system tray.
It also doesn't display Caller ID information if it is provided, just the phone number. While not a deal breaker for me, it should be able to display names from the SIP header and not just an Evolution address book.
SFLphone Conclusions
If the stability issues are resolved, SFLphone could be a great soft phone for daily use, both for average users and power users. It has the right "minimalist" design but still gives enough ability to customize its behavior through global hot keys and multiple accounts to satisfy more demanding users such as myself. If it adds video support with H.263/H.264, multiple audio profiles and a few more global hot key options it would far outshine the others. Its good enough now that I'll be using it daily.
With that said, how about Linphone or CuteCom?
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