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Resurrected Full-Screen VoIP Phones
An anonymous reader writes "Looking for a suitable VoIP phone, I came across these Full-Screen Thin-Client Phones. Not only do they do voice, but they also have a 480x640 screen running at 65K colors and run a number of apps remotely via VNC. They seem to allow a lot more functionality than normal phones, and look really cool too. The site says they have 70 phones running in their office. This seems the way forward for telephony-computer convergence in the 21st century. A document at the end of the page explains their approach and has some cool pictures as well."
To pre-empt the question of whether it runs Linux...
The Broadband Phone (BBPhone) is basically a Strong-ARM 1100, with 8MB of flash, 32MB of RAM, touchscreen, 10Mbps Ethernet and a sound card running a derivative of the Linux 2.2 kernel.
w00t!
With this affordable video phone, now all I need is a practical hover car and society's promises of things I would have by the year 2000 will be complete.
Better late than never, I guess!
I'm a big tall mofo.
Fire a up a server with multiple x-windows sessions, put these around the house.
Sprinkle in a HTPC..
add a pinch of x10
You have a hella integrated house.
Actually the HTPC could be the server.. sweet.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
With one of these, why would I need a "tablet PC"? Just give me VNC windows to remote servers, with cut/paste between my windows. All I want near me is a multimedia client, anyway - all the unique data and compute horsepower should be on networked servers I can hit from anywhere I login. Are we there yet?
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make install -not war
I am very pleased and happy to learn from the article, that these phones have lots to do with Linux. What can I say? Go Linux go...!
The article only contains a few sentences, so it's hard to tell either way, but I get the impression these are prototypes left over from AT&T Research. In that case this is hardly a product you can buy off the shelf, which is the impression the Slashdot story gives.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
640x480 resolution and what could be an akward user interface. Not only that, but you have to use VNC in order to really do anything at all. Yeah, it's a cool device, but it never had any real world potential. Can you honestly see this taking over in corporate America with the non-geeks? I can't.
The new Vonage WiFi phone is the closest thing to something like this that will actually have potential. Around here, there are a lot of WiFi points that are free. I can go to almost any of the locally owned coffee shops and get free WiFi access. Now that has some potential, emphasis on some.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/06/0 013217
But with something that will be staying on the desk - why not create software for a computer? Well, I'm sure the company knows it'll make more money by selling hardware, but aren't there programs like this for computers?
This stuff at AT&T Cambridge was all running in 2001, before AT&T shut down the lab. It all seems like an extremely easy to use system, made of standard protocols and formats that could plug into all our other systems. Why did it die? Why do companies like AT&T collapse after investing time, money and brains into this kind of innovation, and bringing forth only more complicated phonebills?
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make install -not war
Here in Portland, Oregon there are 2^numerous "lingerie modelling clubs" where you go when you're tired of video porn and want the next step.
I imagine that this would give the girls something pretty profitable to do when they don't have customers.
vicious, untreated political sewage...niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive...worshipless pap
I wonder about the quality of these phones. Does anyone know how they compare to today's VoIP phones (such as the ones offered by Vonage)?
I have bookoo Pentium 133's laying around.
.02 cents..
I think it would be most excellent if someone were to make up a knoppix distro that only exists to be a VOIP client, such as Damn Small Linux doing VOIP..
If someone were to come up with something to turn old POS pc's into dedicated voip boxes that would be pretty interesting..
Just my
Because thin clients threatens the wintel architecture ... the pc model.
The Microsoft Smart Display (SD) technology that appeared a couple of years ago.
When I first heard about it, the idea of what was essentially a touchscreen terminal attached wirelessly to your desktop seemed to open a huge number of possibilities, VoIP telephony being one of them. Ultimately, Smart Displays failed - one of the main reasons being the price and the simultaneous release of the Tablet PC which was similar, yet gave much more VFM. The SD tended to be based around CE.NET running on an ARM chip with around 32MB of RAM if I remember correctly.
So, although these 70-odd phones at the Cambridge labs are unique (you can't buy them commercially), there exists out there a large number of devices with ARM chips, touchscreens and WiFi that are capable of doing this kind of thing. You can probably pick them up cheap now so modifying a secondhand SD device may be a neat way to get started...
Maybe the phone companies should institute video caller ID with this phone.
When you call someone, your image shows up.
I can't wait to make my image goatse.cx or tubgirl.com.
You'll need them on both ends, of course. And you're more likely to be calling people who have (or can be persuaded to get) a Mac and an iSight, or something comparable on the PC side, than ones who have these admittedly nifty but scarcer-than-hens-teeth gizmos.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
With a phone like this telemarketing drones could actually see the timezone they are calling rather than the current system of "how am i suppose to know it's 5am where you at".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
to help people than garden gnomes!
Recycling is a good and wonderful thing. However, a telephone is a normally on device. Yes, you can reduce power consumption in an old PC by removing unnecessary hardware but we are still talking about one very hungry telephone!
... those lying rat bastards!
;-)
With this affordable video phone, now all I need is a practical hover car and society's promises of things I would have by the year 2000 will be complete.
What about common supersonic civilian transport, robots to do our house cleaning and upkeep, and a standard 20 hour work week.
We were promised all of these things, had one taken away (the Concord, which never really fulfilled the promise but was more of a teaser), and certainly don't seem to be getting our 20 hour workweek anytime soon.
Don't let them sidetrack you from the other promises by giving you a flying car! You'll still need to get your pilot's license to fly it, and you'll still be working a 60 hour week!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I've got 200 or so analog web phones sitting in a warehouse (make me an offer suckers?) that had a voice modem and handset and a web browser and touch screen. The software developers went broke before it ever got all the bugs out (like ssl -- what ssl?) and so the phones sit in their boxes.
The voice modem option of the ones I have should be fast enough to do voip (if they had an ethernet interface but that never happened either) or run linux but I never got around to hacking them in any useful way.
There was lots of technology from a few years back that was hunting for a market that they never found.
Does that poster's write-up seem a little to glowing to any of you as well?
Vonage doesn't make IP phones - they make telephone adapters which convert typical analog phone signals into IP. The question you ask is still valid, though...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
I can't believe that nobody picked up on the fact that this is very similar to the cisco voip phone, which now supports videoconferencing, and is entirely driven by the backend server.
Ebay?
Fortunately PC power supplies don't run continually at maximum wattage. Even if it didn't have sleep mode, its still quite reasonable, as long as you weren't running an office full of "PC phones." Compare to a refridgerator/freezer, which is always on.
Does anyone know how much bandwith does a net phone consumes during a call? I wasn't able to find that info anywhere. thanks.
Pretty much everything you mentioned is actually plausible in the next quarter decade. Robots are getting pretty impressive. Burt Rutan is working on supersonic civilian flight (the next big app for suborbital ships after space tourism is fast intercontinental travel).
As for the 20 hour work week, well... those 60 hours you presently work? You're spending at least 40 of them as an unpaid serf of the taxman. That's where the 20 hour work week went: it went to Washington. To get it back, elect a Libertarian.
I want one of those sooo badly. I wonder if you can attach a booster to get an even better coverage area. That phone is the next thing on my list of gadgets...
This is just a phone with a screen, not a video phone! Check out www.packet8.net if you want to see a real video phone.
I want one!!!
Just say no to license servers!!
This article has an unusually frank account of why the famous Cambridge lab that developed these phones got closed down. It also has an interesting discussion of the phone itself.
The article suggests that in the end it was easier for AT&T to shut the lab down than for its lawyers and those of a willing purchaser to reach an agreement on intellectual property.
Here's a history of the phone project.