A few days back I noted that Gigaset had released new firmware that was reputed to have a microphone mute function. This prompted me to put my S685IP back in service. I installed the system on my network and let…
Suddenly Siemens Gigaset popped up on my radar this week, on two fronts at once. To start with Alan Lord pointed out on a post to the Asterisk Users Mailing List that Siemens have released some new firmware that adds a mute functionality to one of the soft keys when on a call.
I’ve been thinking a lot about headsets and headphones lately. This comes to be for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I left my favorite headset for listening to music in a coworkers car, and I don’t think I’m getting them back. Secondly, my favorite cell phone headset is very aged, and near death. Finally, I’ve been needing to upgrade the headset hardware that I use for telephony to better address my increasing use of wideband telephony. That has both desk-bound and portable aspects to be considered.
So I decided that I’d try a bunch of headsets of various sorts and see what I found the most appealing. This got started last December my wife bought me a Plantronics .Audio 480 headset as a gift. I’ve been using it quite a bit and I’m just about done with a written review of my experience using that device.
A few days ago on the Asterisk Users Mailing List Tzafrir Cohen of Xorcom fame started an interesting thread about the possibility of a community developed IP Phone.
A common wisdom here is that one should use a proper hardware phone rather that an extra software on the user’s PC. Why is that such a big issue?
One thing that bothers me with the current crop of hardware SIP phones is that they are hopelessly proprietary.
So what would it take to build a fully-adaptable phone?
I am 100% behind the assertion that most users want a hard phone on their desk. Soft phones, even good ones, seem to be exclusively the domain of those who travel and vertical niches like call centers.
Last year a number of people lead a charge to get Skype to open their network to greater interoperability with the open standards-based VoIP world. Gizmo5’s Michael Robertson, ever the instigator, was perhaps the most vocal of the group. Various others weighed in with opinions, including such notables as Dan York, Andy Abramson, Phil Wolff, Alec Saunder & others. At the time it sounded not unlike Mr Reagan telling Mr Gorbachev to “tear down these walls.”
Then word came out of Astricon that Digium had forged a partnership with Skype. The result would be “Skype For Asterisk,” a channel module allowing the integration of Skype into the leading open source IP-PBX platform. A great cheer went up all around VoIP-land. There was much rejoicing.
A short while ago I was informed that Counterpath had issued a new release of their Eyebeam soft phone for Windows. This release, v1.5.19.4 Build 51814 available from their support forum, was supposed to address the interoperability issues I encountered last fall when passing G.722 calls between Eyebeam and a Polycom hard phone.
I downloaded the program and took it with me on a business trip the following week. Upon initial installation I found that the program overwrote the version that I had been issued by ZipDX. I suppose this makes sense as both were in the v1.5 branch. However, the license key that ZipDX had provided would not enable the new release. I contacted Counterpath and they very quickly provided me a license key to enable the new release.