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Resurrected Full-Screen VoIP Phones

Posted by timothy on from the device-of-the-future-of-the-past dept.

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."

5 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. The question is.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  2. 5 Years Late by bigtallmofo · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  3. Prototypes? by Dan+East · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Prototypes? by stab · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

  4. VOIPix ?? by pair-a-noyd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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..