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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!
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!
A screen phone is not a video phone.
You're right, they are left over equipment from AT&T Labs Cambridge, which were redeployed in the Laboratory for Communication Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
:-) Feel free to get in touch with the main man behind the phones, Rip Soham, if you are interested in more details (contact details in the link).
But they're more than prototypes, the phones work really well even six years after being built (mainly due to their thin-client architecture, as only the servers need to be upgraded to run more complex services, not the edge phone hardware).
It's a bit of a shock to see this randomly show up on Slashdot, but for those interested readers, here's a WIP paper about what we're doing with them these days (using the Active Bat location system to migrate mobile phone calls via Bluetooth to the nearest environmental phone among other things).
As I said, the paper is very much WIP, and is being hacked up after being freshly rejected from a conference so the link is liable to disappear
As far as I know, no commercially available VoIP phone uses VNC these days, which is a real pity as its a really neat way to offer easily upgradable services to the end user (forget running mobile code on the edge device, compute power is cheap these days).
Sigh, wish you could edit Slashdot posts.
The correct link to the department is:
Laboratory for Communication Engineering, and the correct name is Rip Sohan (sorry!)
1. WebTV/msntv
2. Thin clients fall directly into the MS mindset. Everything runs off the server, and you subscribe to a 'service', perpetually. No 'piracy' allowed, and they have ultimate control over your desktop, and your wallet. Stop paying, your PC doesn't work anymore.
Microsoft (and Oracle and Sun and all the others) will 'like' whatever model brings the most profit. If they can make thin clients work in the mond of the user, they will.
If you have the right gateway, a SIP phone can call any regular phone. I don't see what an iSight has to do with it; these are screen phones, not video phones.