In addition to the iPhone, the E61 and my ‘pub phone’ (a little-used Skypephone) there’s another couple of phones in my life and I’m coming to resent them more and more. It’s my home phones.
They’re rubbish.
I didn’t want to buy a new landline handset. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t do landlines at all – they feel pointless. Personal communication shouldn’t be tied to a location – I don’t want someone to have to think about where I am before they call me. But there’s a couple of services we can’t have without it (the entry phone to our apartment block, for example, calls our wired phone when someone presses our buzzer) and it still feels rude to ask overseas friends to pay higher rates to call our mobiles (not everyone has discovered the joy of VOIP) . So I can’t yet reach this state of nirvana and having resigned myself to this, I paid £70 for a pair of Panasonic DECT handsets with a simple answer machine and received them this week.
Being the nerd I am I did, of course, start to read a load of reviews before I bought them, but I grew bored of the limited feature-set and ended up just buying something that looked passable and featured somewhere near the top of Amazon’s sales ranking. It’s not that the budget was terribly tight… it’s not unlimited by any means but I would have spent more for something exciting. It’s just there really doesn’t seem to be much out there. Particular complaints are:
Ni-MH batteries (I didn’t realise they even still existed).- No contacts synchronisation (and no, similar models with a ‘copy from SIM’ feature don’t count… who keeps their numbers of the SIM any more?)
- Three (yes three!) wallpapers (one usable) without any option to disable it on a ‘glorious’ 1.5″ screen.
- A UI that makes my first ever mobile’s interface (the Ericsson GH868, since you ask) look like that whizzy glass / touch thing Tom Cruise had in Minority Report.
OK, so we’re a couple of hundred words in and I’m still not really to the point. Sorry about that.
What I’m driving at is not just that I want more a more capable handset, but that the existence of such a big gap is ludicrous – my Skypephone has a feature set that’s far superior, can be extended further, attaches to my computer for syncing and cost about the same – but that there’s no need for a difference.
I’m ready for my femtocell now please that makes my mobiles usable at home. And none of this dodgy BT Fusion rubbish either – something that works with all our phones, no lock in. Perhaps even with the girlfriend’s non-smartphone.
Or a GrandCentral-eque service that allows geographic and mobile numbers to be added, calls to roam and hunt whilst still retaining the better pricing that’s typically available for consumer landlines.
Sure, I might be able to cobble something together with existing services or ‘roll my own’ with an Asterisk box at home or similar, but this has to be reliable and normob-friendly. At least I’d like proper spec handsets with bluetooth and contacts syncing… that’s not too much to ask. Is it?
Why can’t all my phones be like my mobiles?
Agreed, here here. Landline handsets are just appalling….
I’m impressed that you managed to get all those bars on your iPhone! ;o) That E61 looks ginormous squeezed between Apple’s baby and the offspring of 3 and Skype’s unholy union.
The whole femto cell thing… I’m thinking of the possibilities of using one out of the country. “Roam” on your home network whilst staying in a foreign hotel!
Anthony’s last blog post..Jaiku, had it a while and now to actually use it…
Agreed here too. My home DECT handsets are getting a bit battered and past it – I just can’t work up any enthusiasm to replace them. Why is it taking the fixed line telcos so long to move with the times!?
Just wanted to throw the hands up and say: we don’t have a landline : )
The ONLY time I’ve ever wished we did is when I come back after having a few across the road and realize my mobile battery is dead and I don’t have my laptop (can’t charge the iPhone), Purpose is of course to call my parents and order a wake-up call ; )
I had the same problem and it took a lot of research to find the Siemens Gigaset® SL565 – bought a triple pack off eBay (£150) and several months on I am extremely happy.
OK the UI is a bit like a mobile phone from 4 years ago. However, they have bluetooth which means I get headset support with voice dialing and transferring of contacts between phones by bluetooth. The bluetooth headset support was what clinched it for me, and very reliable it is too.
You can have different photos and melodies for different callers (although no MP3 or WAV support sadly), and they support SMS if you really need it on a DECT phone.
Finally, they don’t look too ugly and the base station is separate from the chargers, so it is now in a cupboard under the stairs. The phones have very minimal charging units which is a refreshing change from the BT Synergy handsets they replaced.
Oh – and they have LiON batteries.
Is there a long-term market for fixed-line voice? IMHO, nope.
Ben laments the user-unfriendlyness of VoIP.
Wait 5 years and ALL mobile calls will be VoIP. Mobile LTE makes all traffic packet. At 10’s of MB/sec real speeds. Bye bye circuit-switched voice and ADSL – soooo 1900’s.
Think this is fantasy? 5 years ago at the dawn of 3G, who would have predicted that 20,000 UK normobs a WEEK would be buying little USB dongles and getting megabyte speeds across >90% of the nation. Or the iPhone.
For locations where wireless coverage is unfeasable, you’ll have a ‘landline’ – but it will have voice as one of many other apps, all running using IP. The Femto/WiFi box at the end will untether your mobile, to take these calls.
£0.02
Mike
But is there really a market for them?
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The problem is that Landline providers (BT in the UK) aren’t in the business of selling phones any more. They don’t want to move into subsidising handsets like the mobile networks. What spurs mobile innovation is that carriers charge £FREE for a £500 bit of hardware and hope to make the money back on the contract.
Because I have ADSL, I’m obliged to have a landline. I wish OFCOM would properly decouple BT so that I could just buy ADSL without needing a voice package.
I only get calls from my parents and tele-marketers on the land line. As I never call out, all I need is a phone that displays caller ID and…. wait… nope… that’s it.
I can see a use for dual DECT / VoIP phone like this – http://shop.cd-writer.com/catalog/netgear-sph200d-dualmode-cordless-phone-with-skype-p-80205.html
But, really, do I want people calling a location or would I rather they called me?
@Anthony: Licensing issues may mean operators take steps to prevent use of their femotcells outside of the area they cover (see http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/28/hands-on-with-the-samsung-ubicell/). Although as soon as this starts there’ll be a hot black-market in hacked devices. The example linked is GPS based which seems odd for an indoor device though.
@MIke: I agree about the long-term life-expectancy of fixed-line other than as backbone for femtocells. However, I’m not sure I lament the user-unfriendliness of VOIP… Skype, Vonage and even Truphone demonstrate it’s pretty accessible, but many of the people calling us don’t even have computers let alone broadband so it’s just not an option at all and we’ll always need to accommodate the slowest adopters (internationally).
@Liam: Good tip, thanks. Will check them out.
This might go some way towards solving the problem. Take landline calls on your mobile via bluetooth and visa-versa.
http://mobilecrunch.com/2008/03/11/grace-digital%e2%80%99s-new-xlink-cellular-gateway/
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@Ben: How many firms have tried to crack the VoIP UI nut? I ran out of fingers, and that was just the ones I could think of off-hand 😉
Thing is, POTS is successful because it’s the SMS of the voice world – bloody simple, globally standardised, works on any device. VoIP will remain a niche until it is simple, standardised and works on anything.
This will obviously happen when the BT’s of this world fully embrace VoIP, like Vonage etc have where – ironically – it behaves just like POTS.
You don’t need a PC to use VoIP (any 3 Skypephone user or Skype WiFi handset owner does so every day) and the telco can give you a wee analogue to digital converter box to plug your POTS handset into, giving you – again, ironically – dialtone.
/m
I’ve got voip on my router (using a normal landline handset) so I set up a geographical number with a redirect to my mobile after three unanswered rings.
So if I’m at home, I can pickup the call on the conventional handset and if I’m away, it connects to my mobile at about 12p/min. As I only give out my geographical number to people who’d have a reason not to call my mobile, I don’t receive that many ‘landline’ calls so the monthly cost is negligible.
I’m likely to be switching back to ADSL from cable broadband shortly (read BadPhorm for the reason why!) but will have absolutely no use for the voice element of BT’s £11/mth broadband tax.
If only I could get an HSDPA dongle with a 100GB monthly allowance for £25…
🙂
HeavyLight’s last blog post..Apple, RM Battle Shapes Up
Follow-up:
Two ‘interesting’ landline handset / VOIP cross announcements this week:
Thomson Symbio – http://techdigest.tv/2008/03/thomson_symbio.html
Panasonic Skype / Fon – http://techdigest.tv/2008/03/panasonic_and_f.html
Landlines are pointless and any sort of decent phones are expensive. Only reason I have one is because I need Internet, And live with mum. So she pays BT line rental and uses the line as I refuse to have anything to do with using a Landline or anything to do with BT cos they are Utter CRAP at providing a decent service and need serious beating! (Sorry)
Bring on the days when Mobile Broadband is upto speed with Fixed line Broadband and I’ll settle with a HSDPA dongle!
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