VoIP

Obi Hai Ships OBi1032 IP Phone

OBi1032-SIP-PhoneObi Hai has been around a long while. Their niche has been ATA-like devices that were sufficiently sophisticated to provide hardware access to Google Voice. As was discussed when they appeared on VUC, the founders of the company were in involved in the earliest days of VoIP. More specifically, they were behind the development of Cisco ATA 186, the very first ATA.

In years past I’ve watched as others have expressed their enthusiasm for the OBi Hai ATAs, especially those who were trying to leverage Google Voice. GV has never been a significant factor in my working life.

Further, I’ve long held that ATA’s  fail to offer many of the advantages of a bone fide IP phone. I do admit that OBi Hai was quite aggressive about extending the capabilities of the humble ATA beyond the demands of the typical ITSP. Nonetheless, ATAs have held little interest for me in recent years.

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Wired Headsets: A Tutorial on Connectors, Cables & Pinouts

Headset DevicesPrior to smart phones life was much simpler…at least with respect to the wiring for headsets used with portable music players vs cell phones. A recent project has me dealing with some wired headsets. I thought it worth sharing some of the things that I’ve noted along the way, along with just a bit of the history.

What I’m describing relates to the various ways in which the common headset connector has been used over time and across a number of application contexts, including:

  • Music players
  • Desk phones
  • Smart phones
  • Computers

In the beginning there was the pocket transistor radio. When Sony got around to it some transistor radios featured a 3.5mm (1/8”) 2-conductor jack. This was intended to receive an earphone for private listening. It was also called a “mini-jack” since stereo headphones for listening to music used the full-sized, 1/4”  phone plug.

It’s unclear if the creation of the earphone feature was motivated by the desire to listen to the radio after bedtime, or avoid aggravating the Mrs with the play-by-play of the baseball game.

…time passes, until…

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Ubiquiti Networks Announces New VoIP Hardware

uvp-feature-hd-touchscreen-300Several folks have reported that yesterday Ubiquiti Networks sent out a marketing email announcing a new line of VoIP products under their UniFi brand. A quick look at the information offered online reveals some very nice looking hardware. Very nice indeed.

The hardware includes a trio of handsets; UVP, UVP-Pro and UVP-Executive. All are Android powered, reported run Kit Kat (v4.4.2) on dual core Cortex A9 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. They all sport 1 GB of RAM and 4 GB of local storage.

The entry-level UVP model is a bit feature constrained in order to hit a $149 MSRP.

The UVP and UVP-Pro are more-or-less mobile phone-ish in that they feature a 5” capacitive touch screen resolving 640 x 960 pixels. The UVP-Executive is more tablet-like, with a  7” capacitive touch screen resolving 1024 x 600 pixels.

Audio codec support includes; G.722, Speex, iLBC, PCMU,PCMA and GSM. Thus they are capable of wideband telephony.

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A VoIP Supply Q&A Batting .500!

Phoenix Audio Quattro3 USBEarlier this weeks a new blog post over at VoIP Supply caught my attention. It’s a Q&A item that addresses the Phoenix Audio Quattro 3  USB conference phone and the Polycom RealPresence Group 300 video conference end-point.

The first question posed was in reference to using the conference phone with a computer to access online services like Skype. In his reply VoIP Supply blogger Nathan Miloszewski is right on the money, the Quattro3 USB attaches to a host computer as a generic audio device. That means that any software-based client application can make use of it, from Windows Media Player to Counterpath’s Bria , Skype, Hangouts…whatever.

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New Gear: Grandstream GXV3275

Grandstream-gxv3275-right-300pxGrandstream recently released a new model of desk phone, the GXV3275 Multimedia IP Phone for Android. A logical successor to their GXV3175 model, it’s been updated in a variety of ways. Most interestingly, it runs Android 4.2, aka Jelly Bean. This is most recent release of Android that I’ve encountered running on a dedicated desk phone.

My enthusiasm for smart desk phones arises at least in part from a desire to see telephones play a larger role in home automation. This desire I have expressed at various times over the years, although Dave Michels perhaps has gone further with respect to acting upon a similar desire.

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