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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."
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
Speaking as a corporate America drone, this thing looks better than the phone I currently have on my desk. My phone has no screen at all, which makes it difficult to use any of the advanced features. One use that immediately comes to mind for a phone with a good screen is looking up people in my phonebook, although maybe it would be better to just do this on a desktop computer and have some way for the computer to dial the phone for you. Oh wait, did you say non-geek? Never mind.
WiFi seems orthogonal to this project -- WiFi is about not needing wires and this phone is about a different (better) user interface.
Because computers lock up.
They can get bogged down running an app.
Do you want a phone that is as reliable as your computer? Think about it. It is not good to put all your eggs in one basket.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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...
That's most of the problem. I'd love to throw a system like this together as a project at work, but if the hardware's going to be difficult to replace it takes away a ton of value from my argument *for* implementing it.
I'd assume that someone will latch onto this idea on a more common platform a lot sooner than later. The inclusion of VNC expands what you can do, too.
Imagine this: Those "phones" could be outfitted with higher-quality sound. As you walk by one (ie. RFID or something of that sort), it latches onto an audio stream that you're serving from the central server. The audio stream follows you from one room to the next.
Of course, encryption would have to be required. It'd have to be a tight system with a strong firewall included. And based on what I've seen of the wireless hardware vendors, they tend to leave things pretty insecure. If you think getting your website hacked was bad, imagine the potential of a thin-client intrusion:
Goatse in every room, and Musak following you everywhere.
The point is that while this would be a great idea, this is the time when open-source should be standing up to help make a secure framework for this sort of thing. Closed-source vendors haven't been able to provide evidence of a secure product really... this is a market that is RIPE for an open-source solution.
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.
... 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.
What a 7970? A 7970 looks like it should be a video phone but it isn't. About the only thing usefull you can do with that color LCD is browse the internet, but who is going to do that when they are sitting in front of a computer. If you want to do a video conference you will need to purchase the VT software and a webcam.
Does anyone know how much bandwith does a net phone consumes during a call? I wasn't able to find that info anywhere. thanks.
Why do companies like AT&T collapse after investing time, money and brains into this kind of innovation
In this case because the US government decided to kill it. Read the history of it here That's why you don't have your innovative AT&T anymore, the feds killed it pretty much out of spite. Then they killed it some more by allowing the Baby Bells to raise the rates they charged AT&T for connecting calls into what is essentially the network AT&T built in the first place! Which is why AT&T had to pull out of the residential market a few months ago and is now about to become a part of SBC. Which is very unfortunate, given my past experiences with SBC.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut