Graves On SOHO Technology

I’ve been traveling a lot lately so the phones around my home office have been idle. Even so, I was a little surprised to find that my snom m3 was not making or receiving calls this morning. Well, it was and it wasn’t. I could dial out and the call appeared to be placed, but I never heard any audio. Once clear of today’s VUC call with Dan Behringer, and lunch with my wife, I was able to investigate this further and get the matter resolved.

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Since mid-October the snom m3 has been the only phone on our home account. That’s when the old Panasonic KSU finally breathed its last gasp. I’ve been using one of the snom handsets in my office since they arrived in January. In general I’m pleased with the device. It does what I need and it’s been reliable.

About a week ago my wife came to me with one of the little snom m3 cordless handsets in her hand. She wasn’t mad, but she said that the little phone is source of frustration, and she’d like me to replace it on the home line.

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..or is the correct term “Twittersphere?” In any case, I noticed that snom is officially on Twitter as @ snom. This is nice as it gives a direct channel to/from them. I’ve been exchanging occasional emails with some of their staff as I was a very early user of the m3 SIP DECT system.

I also noticed today that they have recently launched an online forum. It’s in early days yet so there are not that many posts, but the staff seem to be actively engaged. This has to be a good thing. The more end user contact they can manage the better of everyone will be.

Finally, they are running a contest for users of snom 3×0 and 8×0 phones. They’re giving away one m3 SIP DECT system every day until Christmas. In order to participate you must first register, then configure your phone to access their Advent Calendar URL.

I’d love to try it out but I don’t have any of these phones. It’s a very novel marketing concept that leverages online interaction using the micro-browser built into the phones. It’s a great idea!

A recent beta firmware for the snom m3 cordless system introduced a most annoying bug. The handset could be turned off with a simple press of the end call button if the phone was not actually on a call. This made it way too easy to accidentally turn the handset off.

Happily, since I have my phone set to automatically load firmware updates it recently loaded v1.20 beta, and that problem has been resolved. The handset now required an extended press of the end call button to turn it off, just like any cell phone.

Snom tells me that a major firmware release for the m3 is forthcomming.

As of firmware v1.19 beta (and onward) you can upload the contact directory to the snom m3 cordless SIP/DECT phones using the web GUI. The process requires a comma delimited text file (.csv) where each field is enclosed in quotes. For example;

“Alistair Parr”,”666″
“Amanda Blundell”,”684″
“Chris Hopkin”,”667″
“Chris Leonard”,”674″

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About a week ago I loaded the v1.19 beta firmware into my m3 system. No obvious problems but I’ve been traveling since then so I haven’t used it a lot. The snom wiki now has instructions on loading the beta from their provisioning server. It’s easy. I’ve set my phone to check for updates once a week. I see that it loaded v1.20 on its own while I was away. The wiki also has release notes on the v1.19 Beta.

I’m still waiting to get an example of the CSV file used for uploading the contact details. I tried a simple one but it was rejected by the phone. There’s obviously more than just the name and number in the file. Snom needs to provide an example so that I can format my contact details appropriately.