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Use A Regular Phone For Cellphone Calls
nizo writes "Not too long ago I decided to get rid of my landline, however I miss being able to make a call with a regular phone, especially long calls that might drain my battery. It would also be nice if I didn't have to hunt for my cellphone at home when it rings. Well, it looks like there is a simple solution with a Cell Socket, a cradle for your cellphone that can be used to attach your cell line to one or more regular phones." Even better, for those with a landline or VoIP phone, would be a system that automatically picks the cheapest route out for any given call.
Cingular offers a device called a fast forward. You put the device in a cradle that connects to the landline and it automatically forwards all calls to your landline while charging your device.
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:ZWgMwpNIwucJ: www.cellsocket.com/+cellsocket&hl=en
The Dock-n-Talk seems to be a much better product than the Cellsocket.
http://www.phonelabs.com/prd05.asp
It claims to work with over 400 cell phone models and has a bunch of features not found in the Cellsocket.
While we are on it, does anyone know of a product that allows you to make landline calls THROUGH your cellphone? Here is my idea:
1) Landline phone hooked up to a cell phone (Phone A)
2) You have another cell phone (Phone B)
3) Both cell phones are on UNLIMITED Mobile-to-Mobile plan.
4) You place a call from Phone B to Phone A and tell Phone A to dial a number through your landline.
5) You chat on the phone for 3 hours AND USE UP NO MINUTES since you are on Mobile-to-Mobile connection.
Viola, UNLIMITED PEAK MINUTES AT PRICE OF 2 CELL PHONES, CHEAPO 2-PHONE PLAN, AND UNLIMITED LANDLINE!!
Basically, you're looking for something like Least Cost Routers (anybody wanna translate this?). These things have been very popular in Germany ever since the telecom market was deregulated. In Germany you can use other (landline) telecom providers through a Call-By-Call system, dialing the provider's prefix before your actual phone number if you want to use a provider other than your default one (e.g., 01033 for German Telekom, 01013 for Tele2). There's whole websites dedicated to providing lists of the cheapest call-by-call providers. These LCRs can store such lists of providers and their rates for different types of calls (i.e., local, long-distance, other countries, cell phone networks, etc.) at different times of the day/week, and the automatically prefix the number you dial with the cheapest provider's. Of course, lists can be updated manually or automatically. Now, I'm not sure if anybody has built such a device with cell vs. landline vs. VoIP in mind, but if that exists, other Slashdotters who can be bothered to look it up instead of working ;-) will surely post links...
FWIW, there's also an isdn4linux-based LCR tool and corresponding phone rate databases (see English summary at bottom) available. For cell/landline/VoIP solutions, if there's nothing else available, there is probably a good starting point.