Home Phone System That Syncs To Computer?

An anonymous reader writes 'In comparison to the advanced technology in today's smart phones, the standard home phone is painfully backwards. My current setup is a Panasonic system that has 4 cordless phones over one base station. Setting the time on one phone changes the time on all the phones; however, this is not the case for the phone book. Each entry must be manually copied (pushed) to each handset. Is this as far as home phone technology has come? What I would like is a phone system that I could sync to my computer so I could update the phone book over all the units (if not sync with Address Book or Outlook), keep a log of caller IDs, or even forward me new voicemail notifications. Does anyone know if such a system exists?'

Comments

It's called Asterisk

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's called Asterisk, but it requires more than a box you buy at a retail store. You can share a phone book and click-to-dial (Asteridex) based on entries in MySQL. It supports about every feature you can think of for the phone, from wake-up calls to auto-forwarding. Get a VOIP trunk running SIP and you'll also pay far less for phone service. You still need a tiny server running Linux, some IP phones, or an analog card, but you'll have total control and all the features you want. Personally, I like FreePBX (http://freepbx.org), and there are even easier-to-setup versions such as the distro at http://nerdvittles.com/.

My phone setup

[flyboyfred]

I have a Panasonic phone system with 3 cordless handsets and one base station. It keeps all of the phone book entries centrally, so if you change it from one handset all get the change. Same with the caller ID log. No connection to my computer, but this sounds like most of what you're asking for. Maybe you just need a newer phone?

Siemens Gigaset

[dUN82]

I am using a Siemens Gigaset system along with a Siemens M34 USB dongle, which allows you to manage directory form your PC and Skype etc, but you have to do it via outlook, which is painful as well. Personally, I found google contacts to be the most useful across platforms that can be a feature for home telephone that can be further explored. There are later Gigaset phones that allow you to simply copy your sim contacts from your mobile phone to your home phone or batch send it via bluetooth, but I found Siemens phones are not very popular in the US, which it strange because I found Gigaset phones are far more superior in call clarity, os friendliness and have better industrial design and build quality, and runs on standard AAA batteries instead of those battery packs.