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."

Comments

The question is..

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

5 Years Late

[bigtallmofo]

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!

Re:5 Years Late

[Wesley Felter]

A screen phone is not a video phone.

Finally

[Doc Ruby]

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?

Prototypes?

[Dan East]

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

Re:Prototypes?

[stab]

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.

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 :-) 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).

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).

Re:Prototypes?

[DietCoke]

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.

VOIPix ??

[pair-a-noyd]

I have bookoo Pentium 133's laying around.
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 .02 cents..

Perhaps....

[zakezuke]

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".

They promised us more than that ...

[FreeUser]

... 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! ;-)