Telecom Lead America: 8×8, a provider of cloud communications and computing solutions, has launched a new version of its Virtual Office mobile PBX offering compatible with smartphones and tablets.
The company said the new version is available immediately for iOS.
8×8 will launch the smartphone compatible offering for Android devices in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Virtual Office Mobile 4.0 offers the same voice, video and PBX benefits of 8×8’s cloud-based Virtual Office suite and adds an enhanced, feature-rich user interface designed to take full advantage of the iPhone’s and iPad’s Retina display.
Virtual Office Mobile is suitable for businesses with a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy because it eliminates the cost and hassle of platform fragmentation by providing a single solution that works across the business world’s most widely used mobile devices. Analysts already are predicting that enterprises will buy more than $10 billion worth of iPads and Android tablets this year.
Benefits of Virtual Office Mobile 4.0
- Take their office extensions anywhere
Minimize phone tag - Maximize productivity
Increase responsiveness to customers and business partners
- Conduct voice and video calls over 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi, including free international calling from Wi-Fi hot spots.
- Enjoy better call quality over Wi-Fi and 3G/4G/LTE, even under low-bandwidth connections, using new advanced compression technology that requires half the bandwidth of the previous version and does not impact audio quality.
- Record calls on demand, freeing them to focus on the conversation rather than taking notes.
- Access PBX features such as call transfer, conference bridging and directories.
- See the status of co-workers (available, busy/on a call or Virtual Meeting or offline) and send instant messages.
- View incoming faxes.
- Display business voice mails in a scrollable list, allowing users to listen to and delete messages in any order.
- Have outbound calls appear with the caller ID of their office numbers to protect the privacy of their mobile numbers and minimize the need for multiple numbers and mailboxes.
- Park a call and then pick it up on their office desk phone.
- Test call quality before initiating calls, eliminating annoyances and wasted time.
“With Virtual Office Mobile 4.0, workers will now have a single voice and video softphone solution that works across all iOS devices, with no tradeoffs in call quality and user experience,” said 8×8 chairman & CEO Bryan Martin.
 “8×8’s Virtual Office Mobile offers our business the features and functionality to stay connected and be productive with high-quality voice across our various offices and wherever our people may be,” said Ed Arango, vice president of Sales and Marketing for Mariners General Insurance Group.