Graves On SOHO VoIP

thomasat1 post a nice YouTube screencast how-to on using PhonerLite for Windows to call the VoIP Users Conference. This video clip highlights a couple of interesting things.

First, PhonerLite is a nice, reliable, freeware soft phone that’s wideband (G.722) capable. If you stop and consider that about 15 months ago I could not find any working G.722 capable soft phones, the availability of such software is quite a leap forward.

Further, thomasat1 doesn’t even bother setting up the soft phone with any SIP credentials. None are required since the ZipDX bridge will accept incoming calls directly.

Nice work, thomasat1. Thanks for Zeeek for pointing it out.

It’s been a while since I revisited this series on Make Use Of Wideband Voice Right Now! Over the past six months a number of things have changed. Google bought Gizmo5 and has for some time shut down new account sign-ups while they work out how to incorporate Gizmo5 into their voice applications.

With the demise of FWD as a SIP service earlier in 2009 Gizmo5 was probably the most high-profile, publicly available free SIP registrar. Their loss has to be felt as something of a setback to those who want to use HDVoice Right Now! Perhaps over time Google will make up for the current inconvenience.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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