Have you had the Karl experience? From the VUC mailing list this morning. Allison Smith just created a hysterical parody music on hold Parody. Whatever you were doing, stop, and dial this number to listen to it: 360-519-5689. 2 minutes.…
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Originally published July 1, 2008 at Small Net Builder
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| Product | Polycom SpectraLink Wireless Telephone (8002) |
| Summary | Wi-Fi SIP phone designed for small business use |
| Pros | • Durable construction |
| • Supports strong Wi-Fi encryption | |
| • Centrally managed provisioning | |
| • Good voice quality | |
| • Reasonable battery life | |
| • WMM works as promised | |
| Cons | • Fiddly initial network configuration |
| • No support for compressed codecs like G.729 | |
| • Relatively expensive | |
Polycom is a leader in the IP communications space. Not only are their longstanding SoundPoint series of desktop IP phones class leaders, but their voice technology can be found in many products under many names.
Seeing a need to expand their product offering to include cordless mobility, Polycom recently acquired SpectraLink, a leading maker of Wi-Fi-based telephony systems, and Kirk Telecom, a leader in DECT-based cordless telephony systems. These acquisitions, now consolidated under the Polycom name, give the company a comprehensive product suite addressing the mobile IP communications needs of various vertical markets.
I bought this phone system on Woot.com in response to my wife’s request that we get something new for our home line. At $49 it was at least a serious bargain. I see this very system offered on Amazon.com for $80. With four handsets and a base even that seems like a good price.
The Voice Report has today released a nice podcast on cellular and smartphone security called "The Secret Agent Phone."
A group in Germany have successfully analyzed and cracked the encryption used in DECT cordless systems using relatively trivial hardware. They've published an article (in German) and presented at this weeks Chaos Communications Congress (25C3). From the description of their…
I hate to admit this, but on December 24th my wife and I went to Best Buy looking for a last minute gift. We decided that her younger brother needed a Tivo. Ours is a three Tivo household, although only TivoHD sees any real use these days. One you get used to having a DVR you want one on every TV, and radio too for that matter.
Though we’d had two SD Tivo units for years when we bought or HDTV we initially got the Time Warner HD-DVR instead of Tivo Series 3. The Tivo Series 3 units were $800 at the time, more than we were willing to pay. That experience was enlightening, like stepping back into the dark ages. What crappy menus, and basically no intelligence at all in the software. The CableCo DVR was simply dreadful.
