Siemens S685IP: Beyond Cool

This afternoon I took a few minutes to get the S685IP setup and working. I thought I’d use it in the office today as I was going about my daily toil.

A few snips, a little solder & some electrical tape is all it took to provide power. I had to splice the universal power supplies that I bought last night into the lines from the manufacturers supplies power supplies. The voltages and current ratings matched, but the connectors didn’t. Is this what’d we’d call a “hardware mash-up” in web 2.0 parlance?

I had the base registered with OnSIP in about 5 minutes. It’s registering with two separate domains on the same account. Thus I can get work and personal calls. One of the truly great things about OnSIP is that they support multiple phones using the same registration. When a call comes in they simply all ring. Very handy.

It’d be interesting to know if the G.722 codec works through OnSIP. Their support people think it might if the call is handled via SIP URI. That way it won’t touch a media gateway and get negotiated down to G.711. If anyone is interested in trying this please contact me and I’ll pass you the SIP URI.

I’d try using one of the newer Polycom 650/550 phones, but they’re here in the same room. Not much of a test, really. Nor is Junction Networks music-on-hold extension a suitable source. It’s just the basic Asterisk tracks.

One of the coolest things that I’ve stumbled upon thus far is call recording. The S685 will record any ongoing call into the memory normally used for the voice mail. It’s simple to engage and seems very convenient.

So far the only down side to importing these is that they don’t seem to deal with US standard order of Month, Day, Year. It’s all Day, Month, Year. No big deal I guess.

The S685 and snom m3 are operating in close proximity using separate DECT base radios. There seems to be no interaction between them. Even registering the 2nd and 3rd Siemens handsets went smoothly.