Graves On SOHO VoIP

Paul Otellini of Intel made a keynote address at this past Mobile World Congress. One of the things he highlighted was OpenPeak’s OpenTablet 7, which is based on an Intel Moorestown CPU. Here’s a clip from that presentation.

It’s interesting to see how the tablet is the basis of the product and the handset merely an aspect of the dock that provides its context as a business class desk phone. The combination is what OpenPeak has called the ProFrame 7. It’s been a product for quite some time but not available in North America.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody’s perfect, but isn’t it great when a good service keeps getting better? I’ll admit that I completely missed it when way back on January 6th Junction Networks’ issued a press release about the availability of HDVoice in their OnSIP hosted pbx service. I must’ve just overlooked the announcement. Of course OnSIP does HDVoice….I’ve been using them with G.722 capable phones for almost two years.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been reading here for a bit you’ll know that I like my Plantronics .Audio 615m headset. I heartily recommend the Plantronics .Audio lineup for people who need a headset for use with a soft phone.

Since back when this review was published I’ve heard a couple of times that people have had issues with the Plantronics .Audio line not working correctly on Mac systems. Most recently this comment was posted to the review:

Read the rest of this entry »

What with the Mobile World Congress 2010 happening in Barcelona this week there’s some interesting stuff being announced. One that caught my attention today is the formal announcement of OpenPeak’s OpenTablet 7.

I’ve been following OpenPeak for some time, and was very interested in the Verizon HUB, which was also their hardware. However, Verizon Wireless managed to wrestle a possibly great product offering into failure with onerous contractual terms and their typical heavy handed insistence upon absolute control.

Read the rest of this entry »

Randy Resnick (a.k.a. Zeeek, or more recently Dulo Par) the founder of the VoIP Users Conference, has a guest post over at HDVoice News called, “An “ear opener” to HD voice in conferencing.” Randy details the advantages of wideband voice for large public conference calls. He should know, having produced thousands of hours of podcast based upon such calls over the past few years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hereabouts we do love our Gigaset cordless phones. Actually, that’s overstating the case a bit. Recent firmware releases, notably the November & December issues, have proven to be troublesome for some users. It’s tempered our enthusiasm just a little. An earlier post about Gigaset firmware developed a most impressive comment trail.

Not long ago Tony Stankus, Product Manager for Developing Technologies at Gigaset Communications, passed me a note about a new beta firmware release.

Read the rest of this entry »

I find that I’m simply drawn to novel and innovative approaches to problems. In the VUC post-call ramble this past week Michael White of E4Technologies described something that’s stuck in my mind as being pretty cool.

He was working with a large-company-who-shall-remain-nameless on a very significant installation. It was going along well. They had selected a line of SIP hard phones from a large, well-known  manufacturer, and were generally happy with the results. That is, happy with one exception; they didn’t like the performance of  the speakerphone on their chosen model of desk phone.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months back I received a sample of a new USB attached personal speakerphone device made by Yamaha. It arrived about the same time that I started looking for a better solution for ad-hoc conference calls in small rooms, like hotel rooms. You may recall that I felt this need after the experience after hearing Zeeek trying to conduct a VUC call from the host hotel at Astricon 2009.

As is my usual strategy, I tossed the little PSG-01s into my suitcase thinking that I make use of it for a while and see how it handles the road. It’s been on the road quite a while now, and doesn’t seem to suffer the travel a bit. The device is a rugged little aluminum tube. It’s built to last.

Yamaha has a long and enviable history in pro audio products, many of which I’ve used in TV and recording studios over the years. The little PSG-01s is a more consumer oriented offering, but it seems like a well-considered design.

Read the rest of this entry »