phone

Review Delayed: Dreamwave SIP-D28P

Dreamwave-D28P-200I wanted to be working on reviewing the Dreamwave SIP-D28p by now, but that effort has been delayed due to a firmware issue. The phone is powered-up and running. I’ve been able to use it a bit, exploring its firmware, web GUI, etc. It shows some promise. There are some nice features in the device.

However, I came to a screeching halt when I found that the phone doesn’t provide sidetone into the handset. This stopped me dead in my tracks. The lack of sidetone makes using any phone very unnatural. Thus I’ve not been able to put it on my desk and actually use it as my primary phone. That’s the process that forces me to gain enough experience with a device to write about it sensibly.

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New SIP Wifi Handsets: Yawn!

SQ3000Some time back the folks over at VoIP Supply posted something about a collection of new SIP Wifi handsets. Whereas in the past that would make me take notice, even catch my interest, I found myself completely disinterested. In fact, it was surprising how little appeal these gadgets had.

Over the years I’ve tried various SIP Wifi handsets and come to a very simple conclusion. That is, for my home office application they have no merit at all. The fact that I have a solid cordless SIP solution eliminates the possible interest that any of these new products might have.

In everything experiment that I’ve ever tried DECT/CATiq products soundly beat any dedicated SIP Wifi handset. Now that there are affordable SIP/DECT products from sources like Gigaset and Snom dedicated VoWifi handsets just don’t measure up for many applications.

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Turbo-Charge Your Gigaset Setup Experience!

siemens-a580ip-160

Here’s  a nice little tidbit for you. One of the more annoying tings about setting up a Gigaset cordless SIP/DECT phone is the sluggishness of the web interface. In the first draft of my A580 review I made specific mention of this, but it was dropped in a later revision. I curse those editors! A few people have since commented about this as well.

There’s been a long running thread about the Gigaset line over at Broadband Reports VoIP Tech Chat forum. “Jan1973” recently posted advising that browsers other than IE or Firefox don’t exhibit this problem at all. That suggests that the matter truly isn’t the Gigaset web server, but rather how the browsers are rendering the pages. “Jan1973” further suggests using k-meleon, which is  free download from SourceForge.

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Into The Great Unknown: The Dreamwave D28P

D28P-200Earlier this week Asterisk guru Ward Mundy pointed out an E-bay auction for a phone that looked kinda familiar and purported itself as offering “HDVoice” – the Dreamwave Networks D28p. A quick Google online revealed that Dreamwave Networks are based in New Jersey, and their web site looked to have both a brochure and some documentation about the device. I even found a tutorial on setting up the phone for use with various Asterisk distributions.

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Review: Etymotic ETY.COM Headset

ETYMOTIC-ETY-COM-PACKAGE-200I’m pretty jazzed about the Etymotic Research cell phone headset that I’ve been using the past few months. Most people probably don’t get too excited about cell phone headsets, especially wired models. Let’s just say that I’m not “most people” and leave it at that. This thing rocks!

I have a long history of using noise canceling headsets for listening to music. This because for the last fifteen years my job has involved a lot of travel, and airplanes are noisy places. I started out using Sony MDR-NC10s, which were amongst the first noise canceling headphones offered. To frame this up in time, I used them with a mini-disc player long before the introduction of the iPod.

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