VUC529 on Friday, February 20th will feature Grandstream Networks addressing issues of security and surveillance. Phil Bowers, Global Marketing Communications Manager, will be discussing their range of security cameras and new NVR-3550 network video recorder. One of the key things…
Earlier this week Gigaset extended their Gigaset Pro line by adding a new 10” Android tablet they call Maxwell. I must say that at first glance the device looks VERY nice.
As just an Android tablet Maxwell is a little unremarkable. The display is 1280 x 800 pixels. It runs Android 4.2.2, aka Jelly Bean, which is a little old on the eve of widespread Lollipop rollout.
What makes Maxwell stand out from the crowded tablet marketplace are the customizations intended to make it a communication centerpiece. These include;
Color me curious about this tablet. I’d simply love to lay hands on one. I suspect that won’t happen since their Gigaset Pro line has not been offered in North America. The only thing that made it to these shores was the Gigaset DX800A
While I recently lamented the last UC Strategies podcast woefully narrowband presentation, in the interest of fairness I must today point out that they are not alone in this. Today the latest No Jitter Podcast, hosted by Guy Clinch, published an interview with Andrew Prokop of Arrow S3. It suffers a similar lack of lack of regard for HDVoice.
Mr Prokop’s SIP Adventures blog has proven interesting, so I thought the podcast worth a listen. Sadly, while the host is presented full bandwidth, as might be expected from a local recording, the guest is presented in narrowband. Given that the subject matter is WebRTC I think that this is more than a little anachronistic. WebRTC-based services are in fact a very easy way to enjoy wideband audio for the purposes of producing a podcast.
Dragging the podcast in my trusty editor I find it to the a definitive example of full-band audio vs narrowband. The file is sampled at 44.1 kHz, so the top of the vertical axis is 22 kHz. The guests audio is a good quality PSTN call, but even that is quite a contrast from the host. This contrast is very jarring to the listener.
This morning my normally tranquil home office was pierced by the sound of a neighbors lawnmower. The lawnmower, while aggravating, is just the lead-in to that most vile of power tools…the leaf blower. Leaf blowers should be outlawed.
All of this has thinking about noise. In even modest amounts, noise degrades our ability to communicate. Beyond simply annoying, it hampers productivity. Therefore noise has very real costs. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of conference calls or video conference calls. These are cases where extraneous noise should be avoided.
The classic conference call wisdom, good advise to this day, is that all participants to should diligently mute themselves when not speaking. People being what they are, many do not know of or act upon this belief.
When using a managed conference bridge, like ZipDX, the call moderator has the ability to mute a noisy participant, ensuring that their local acoustic reality doesn’t degrade the call experience for everyone. That’s great, but it really just allows the moderator to compensate for the fact that someone on the call is exhibiting poor conference call etiquette.
Obi 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.
Several 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.