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Wireless Networking Communications Hardware

Vonage to Produce a WiFi Phone 213

Posted by michael from the convergence dept.
EvilStein writes "Vonage is announcing plans for a WiFi phone that will allow Vonage subscribers to make VoIP calls from any WiFi hotspot. The phones are said to cost about $100. This looks to be a pretty cool setup and might rattle the wireless industry quite a bit if they pull it off." Another story notes that battery life won't be as good as existing cell phones.
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Vonage to Produce a WiFi Phone More

Vonage to Produce a WiFi Phone

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  • GSM/GPRS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wdd1040 ( 640641 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:09PM (#11256253)
    Now, if it could seemlessly integrate with the GSM/GPRS setup already in place with most providers, I'd be all over it.

    • Re:GSM/GPRS (Score:3, Interesting)

      by learn fast ( 824724 )
      Especially since the coverage in my house is shitty. This way, cell providers don't need to worry about that, since people will be able to augment their own coverage in their own homes (they'll just have to worry about making ends meet...)
      • ok what GSM providers should do

        bluephone put bluetooth accesss points for the home intergrate into the base of cheap POTS phones (bluetooth can go 100 Meters but like WiFi big solid wall does nothing for reception )

        lots of cheap access points in the home AND office when your out and about GSM when your at home calls are routed through POTS landline

        or rather than landline use VoIP

        the GSM people could be ISP's and broadcasters think of IP TV tivo all billing through your mobile/cellphone

        they would love i

    • Re:GSM/GPRS (Score:5, Informative)

      by jpetts ( 208163 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:41PM (#11256636)
      This is coming: I have already seen and tried out devices that have VoIP and GSM capability in the same unit. The acronym you need to watch out for is UMA - Unlicensed Mobile Access. Look here [arcchart.com] for basics.

  • Verizon.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by 10101001011 ( 744876 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:10PM (#11256259) Homepage
    Can you hear me n.....

    No carrier detected

  • Old News (Score:5, Informative)

    by jpetts ( 208163 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:10PM (#11256261)
    This is not new [arcchart.com]

  • I have an open access point at my work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by way2trivial ( 601132 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:11PM (#11256265) Homepage Journal
    and at my home... both on consumer grade broadband connections..

    widespread wifi voip will force me to close them. the bandwidth potential is to severe....

    • Re:I have an open access point at my work (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dresgarcia ( 251585 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:18PM (#11256359)
      When researching VOIP this weekend (I am thinking of nixing my home phone for a cell phone and a voip) I found that a call requires 90Kbps of bandwidth.

      Isn't there a port or something you could block to disable VOIP services? I don't know a whole lot about it but I assume it must use a port that could be firewalled out.
      • The art is to simply open the ports you want to allow access on :)

        "Sure, you can surf the web from my connection, but your not going to send crap through it"
      • I dont' know what POS VOIP solution you were using, but here I can run Skype at modem-like speeds ( 5 KB/s ) and get quality as good (or even better than) my landline.

        Since Vonage is developing the phone themselves, they could license Skype's technology, or develop their own, or any number of things. It is *very* doable.

      • What audio codec are you planning on using that requires 90kb/s of bandwidth. A digital phone line from your telco (ISDN) only uses 64k. There are many many VOIP codecs that use less than that... which is pretty much the point behind it. Random codec off the top of my head g.723. 6.4 kb/s

      • Re:I have an open access point at my work (Score:5, Informative)

        by jonbrewer ( 11894 ) * on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:58PM (#11256834) Homepage
        When researching VOIP this weekend (I am thinking of nixing my home phone for a cell phone and a voip) I found that a call requires 90Kbps of bandwidth.

        This depends entirely upon the codec used. 90kbps (full-duplex) would be G.711, while G.729 uses about a third of this:

        http://www.terracall.com/FAQs_white_1.aspx [terracall.com]

        I haven't figured out why so many people use G.711 - voice doesn't need this much bandwidth, and we all know this from years of working with mp3.

        Isn't there a port or something you could block to disable VOIP services? I don't know a whole lot about it but I assume it must use a port that could be firewalled out.

        This can be very tricky. SIP uses UDP 5060 to negotiate calls, then picks variable high ports (~16000 I think) but can be run pretty much anywhere.

        I have been playing with a WiFi VoIP phone from ZyXel at home for the last few weeks & the performance has been adequate. It really depends heavily on the quality of your Internet connection. Unless you have consistent ping times of 50ms and close to zero jitter to your call termination point, you won't enjoy the experience.
        • I haven't figured out why so many people use G.711 - voice doesn't need this much bandwidth, and we all know this from years of working with mp3.

          Simple-- there is just so much overhead that dividing your codec bandwidth does not increase the capacity much.

          In fact, if you check out this good technical presentation [spectralink.com] by Spectralink, slide 13, you will see for example that a G.711 call (64 kbps both ways, i.e. at most 128 kbps) actually utilizes 4.5% of the bandwidth in "11 Mbps" mode (i.e. in the best radio
      • If the 90kbs bandwidth is a concern for you, they do offer other codecs. The lowest one uses 30kbs. The middle one is 50kbs. I use the 90k one, so I don't know how much of a difference the lower ones make on sounds quality. The 90kbs codec sounds just like a regular phone.
      • Yes, there are certain ports for voip that make them impossible to use. I had Vonage until the Campus blocked some port or another to combat a worm or something. Like they say, it seemed to be a good idea at the time. This makes Vonage pretty undesireably because the ports it uses are very widely exploited by worms and such. I think 51-53 are critical, there are others that improve service. Its been a while so I might be completely wrong.

    • You're kidding right? You're OK with "all you can eat" data transfers, but not OK with a steady 90 kbit/second?

    • The bandwidth usage of VOIP isn't very high, like 8k/sec or something. I don't even notice it over my cable modem. You'd need a lot of people using them to badly clog a public access point.

  • Still lame... (Score:4, Funny)

    by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:11PM (#11256274) Journal
    OK, wireless but still less space than a Nomad. I guess that still makes it lame in some people's eyes...

  • Good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by doombob ( 717921 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:11PM (#11256275) Homepage
    This will be a wonderful alternative for many people. Right now, the company I work for is setting up various hotspots on the selling point that you could bring in Vonage, and this will be one more great selling point. It's amazing how many people despise phone companies.

  • XTEN + Ipaq + Asterisk (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have had this setup working for some time now. Works perfectly!

  • Been using Vonage (Score:4, Informative)

    by kvsnut ( 68323 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:12PM (#11256286)
    I've been using Vonage and I dig it so far - altough I'm hoping the international rates come down further.

    I have Verizon for land line and they charge 2.57 per minute to france. I'm not signed up for an international plan but I do have a $60 per month plan. They are shooting themselves in the foot by charging so much for basic line, vmail and international.

    This idea is cool but I don't think it would be an immediate threat to the wireless carriers.

  • More detail, please. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Moby Cock ( 771358 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:13PM (#11256299) Homepage
    Can the phones be used to receive incoming calls? If so, how does Vonage "know" where to address the messages to? Is there a persistent forward channel giving Vonage the phone's location?
    • The phone (or telephone adaptor as the case may be) registers with Vonage when it's turned on. Vonage then knows the IP address the phone is located at. There's even ways of working through a NAT, though obviously an outgoing firewall would be a problem.
    • I'd imagine it worked something like when the phone enters a hotspot it connects to vonage's service so vonage has the address to reach it at. I could also be wrong.

    • Re:More detail, please. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sialagogue ( 246874 ) <sialagogueNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:36PM (#11256582)

      Incoming calls would be no problem, just as they aren't with their modems or softphone. The phone is basically a shrunken VoIP modem with a mic and a wireless card, so I'd assume that the phone declares its IP address to Vonage Central once it logs on to the local network. Vonage then maps your local number to that IP and your on your way.

      Their modems and softphone work the same way. Once they navigate the firewall they log into the Vonage servers and your number is mapped. We use both all the time internationally - we've sent modems to our European offices which has made them accessable with a local New York call, and we use the softphone on business trips to Hong Kong, which has turned a multi-hundred dollar phone bill per trip into nearly zero.

      If you're involved in international business, VoIP is the biggest cost-saving measure since e-mail.

    • Re:More detail, please. (Score:5, Informative)

      by cavemanf16 ( 303184 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:39PM (#11256614) Homepage Journal
      Vonage's current units work by having a unique identifier that they send back to Vonage to identify which "number" the call is coming from or going to. In other words, if I take my Vonage unit with me on the road and have a hotel with broadband available in the room, all I have to do is plug the unit in and I could make calls from it back to my area code as a "local" call. I could also receive calls in my hotel room from people trying to reach me at my "home" phone number. I assume their WiFi phone would work the exact same way.

      I know some /.'ers may poo-poo this idea, but I think it's got some real sticking power. The whole "college kids making free calls" thing mentioned in the article is just one use of many. In the approx. 1yr that we've had Vonage at my home, neither my wife or I have been displeased with the service. Yes, my wife gets displeased when I'm trying to d/l all three Mandrake 10.1 ISO's and she's trying to talk to her mother because I'm swamping the cable connection with my d/l's, but I simply delay the downloads... no big deal.

      I'd also like to mention the sheer joy you will receive when telling your local and long distance telemark-a-droids that there is no way they can beat the price you're currently getting for phone service. When you tell them: "I'm getting every single service you offer PLUS long distance PLUS Canada calls PLUS $0.05-$0.15/min. for International calls for $29.99", you can hear their jaw hit the desk as they say: "Oh. Have a nice day." True, we're not factoring in the price of broadband to that dollar amount, but hell, I'd have broadband whether or not I needed phone service anyways so that doesn't matter.
    • I'm not sure how Vonage will work but you can use Skype on your PocketPC [skype.com] if you have WiFi and at a processor running at minimum 400 Mhz.
    • how does Vonage "know" where to address the messages to?

      Same way as at home. The phone connects to Vonage and with a simple "I'm at x.x.x.x" handshake. Then whenever a call comes in, Vonage pushes the call to that IP. If the phone is no longer at that location (easy enough to determine) then the call goes to voicemail or to the forwarding number (vonage let's to establish a failsafe forwarding number for cases where the vonage PBX isn't on the network currently.

      In really lame psuedo-code:

      When the pho
    • The big problem with leaving it on to receive calls is battery life. An idle WiFi link uses almost as much power as an active link. It just takes a lot of power to maintain an 11Mb/s link to a relatively low powered base station. Compare this to cellphones that can last for hours of talktime and days in standby.

  • Idea (Score:2, Interesting)

    by spac3manspiff ( 839454 )
    Would it be possible to get the same functionality from a PDA with wifi and a mic?

  • Hurdles (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bronz ( 429622 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:15PM (#11256326)

    Forgive my ignorance of the product, but won't it need to continually poll a server to find out if it has an incoming call due to firewalls? Also, does it expect to be able to seamlessly jump wifi networks -- transparent to the user anyway?

    I see the use of using it in a Starbucks, or whatever, but it would hardly make a practical mobile phone. And I doubt people would bother carrying two phones around.

    • I see the use of using it in a Starbucks, or whatever, but it would hardly make a practical mobile phone. And I doubt people would bother carrying two phones around.

      Oh I don't think it's intended to be for anyone that already has a cell phone. More likely it's for anyone travelling that doesn't have a cell phone (or travelling where they don't have service, like say Europe).
      • I think you will find that pretty much all of Europe has cellphone service these days :-)

        Actually, I imagine that what you're trying to get across is that since a couple of the dominant US-based service providers use CDMA based technology, which has no concept of roaming service, you are locked in to that network and only that network. In which case you might want to look at choosing one of the carriers who operate GSM networks instead (AT&T/Cingular or T-Mobile).

        A better alternative for when you're
    • It's not really a mobile phone, it's a cordless phone that works through wifi hotspots. It's useful if you are the type who doesn't want a mobile - if you did, you probably wouldn't have vonage as well unless you lived in one of the few places where you can get broadband but can't get cellular coverage. I imagine that it would be quite useful if you were one of those people who sits at starbucks all day. Incidentally, since you can make a healthy living selling stuff on fleabay you could just get an account
    • won't it need to continually poll a server to find out if it has an incoming call due to firewalls?

      No, what it does is it sends a registration message to the central server every minute or so. This has a double purpose: it lets the server know where to find the device and it pokes a hole through most NAT firewalls. When a call comes in, the firewall is already opened on that particular port and the NAT association is created.

      does it expect to be able to seamlessly jump wifi networks?

      Nope, not when yo

    • Re:Hurdles (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rainman_bc ( 735332 )
      But IIRC that Philly was makeing the city one huge wifi hotspot.

      Wouldn't that cripple the cellular market in philly?
  • First used their XJ100 [net2phone.com] on their VoiceLine service a few months ago. Worked great. Battery life was pretty good too - a couple hours of talking before it had to be recharged.

    Only disadvantage ... 802.11b only. No WPA.

  • Hotspots? Not really..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by djrogers ( 153854 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:16PM (#11256329)
    Granted there are many open hotspots out there, but the easiest to find and most predicatable for the road warrior are all pay-for-play (iPass, tmobile, wayport etc). Given that there's no standard for authenticating to these networks, this kind of thing won't be useable there. Now for home/office use, it looks great!

  • Meh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SilentChris ( 452960 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:17PM (#11256344) Homepage
    I have a similar setup at home:, much cheaper Linksys router with Vonage hooked up to 1 piece of a 2 piece portable phone. The phones are regular models (900 mhz Vtech's I believe). The piece connected to the router goes on the floor, and the other piece is easily accesssible (so I can keep 1 phone or the other charged at all times). The entire setup cost $20 and I can add more phones later if I feel like it.
    • Your setup involves four pieces of hardware counting the phone and base separately, three connections to power (router, cable modem or dsl modem or whatever, and phone) and a wired network connection. This is contained in a mobile phone. The two are ever so slightly different, but thank you for playing.
      • "The two are ever so slightly different, but thank you for playing."

        Yes, except mine costs $20 for the entire setup while this would cost upwards of $300 ($120 for each phone, and a wireless router). Thanks for playing.
        • Actually, at that price, it would cost $300 even. However, your setup did not cost only $20, except maybe at your cost - compare full price to full price for a more fair comparison and then ask your self what people are willing to pay for portability and not having to set stuff up.


    • Instead of locking into those vtech phones and buying expensive additional handsets, here's another way to skin the VOIP throughout the house cat.

      Plug a phone cord into your Vonage box and plug the other end into your wall phone outlet. Go outside, find where the telephone line leaves your house and heads for the pole. Cut that. Plug your vonage box into your network cable. Now all your wall outlets should be live for making Vonage calls.

  • Not time yet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drivinghighway61 ( 812488 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:19PM (#11256373) Homepage
    This is a nifty gadget, but it really isn't functional. VoIP is fine for home use, but at this point there's no reason to choose a portable VoIP phone over a cell phone. There simply isn't a large enough network of WiFi connections yet, not to mention the fact that many of them are personal networks. I'm sure the owners of said networks do not want random passersby using up their bandwidth. If anyone wants one of these toys, fine, but I'm sticking with my cell phone. I can actually make calls without reliance on an internet connection with it.

    • Re:Not time yet (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CKW ( 409971 )
      > I'm sure the owners of said networks do not want
      > random passersby using up their bandwidth.

      Not true *at all*. I and friends run WiFi connections explicitly so people can do stuff like this. Laptops on the park bench below me, disabled guy down the hall barely making ends meet gets to use an old/donated system, friends/strangers walking or driving by who pull out their high-end PDA to refer to something online, WiFi p2p/sharing networks, etc etc.

      What's the old saying? Information wants to be fr

      • Re:Not time yet (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MarkGriz ( 520778 )
        What's the old saying? Information wants to be free?

        New saying - Bandwidth wants to be free!
        Newest saying - WiFi phonecalls want to be free.

        ...which of course they will be once someone captures enough WiFi packets to crack the encyption and clone their own phone to someone elses Vonage account.

    • I wouldn't say that it "isn't functional."
      It is nichey. Here's the three things that it's useful for: 1) some areas have poor cell phone reception, 2) international calls are far more expensive on a cell phone, 3) you can act like you're home even if you aren't :)

  • WiFi VoIP phones unimpressive (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Greg@RageNet ( 39860 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:21PM (#11256393) Homepage
    I hope the vonage effort finally brings a good voip/wifi phone to the market. I have a WiSIP and so far it's been unimpressive. Flakey, difficult to configure and use, and underpowered (audio quality degrades sharply when using 128bit WEP). Lots of room in this market to make a better product!

    -- Greg

  • Deja Vu (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 )

    will allow Vonage subscribers to make VoIP calls from any WiFi hotspot.

    Deja Vu, but for once, not about the article. Wasn't there an outfit called "Rabbit" when mobile phones were kind of taking off (late 80s) in the UK? IIRC you had to stand within 20 yards of some antenna contraption to use them. It was a dismal failure, possibly due to the fact that the only places that had the antennas seemed to be railway stations - right next to a bank of payphones. If this phone doesn't (as TFA suggests) do norm

    • At my old office we had 20,000 square feet of office space. We had the whole building covered with WIFI, it would have been nice to a carry a wifi enabled office phone that intergrated with our pbx. Would have been nice to go down to the server room and still have people call up my extension to contact me. I know there are wireless systems out there for PBXs but most require a FCC permit or at least the nortel ones did. And they are pretty damn pricey.
  • Yet again, the internet bandwidth gets sucked away by something it was not orginally designed for. Instead of supporting 10-20 laptops checking email and news, we'll have 2-3 phones sucking up all the bandwidth while the yuppies and teens chat.

    I don't like it. I don't want to hear more cell phone chatter in my coffeeshop hotspot.
    • Yet again, the internet bandwidth gets sucked away by something it was not orginally designed for. Instead of supporting 10-20 laptops checking email and news, we'll have 2-3 phones sucking up all the bandwidth while the yuppies and teens chat.

      E-mail?? News?? I hope you mean usenet newsgroups in the sci.* hierarchy with "news"! The internet is for serious research only..
    • because the internet was designed for

      hotmail, slashdot, and google news....
      what ever the internet was designed for data exchange and military use. your laptop checking email is just as much a coruption of its origional intent as a cell phone.
    • I don't like it. I don't want to hear more cell phone chatter in my coffeeshop hotspot.

      Then tell the managers that you will no longer frequent their establishment due to the problem. People aren't psychic.

      Yet again, the internet bandwidth gets sucked away by something it was not orginally designed for

      Yet again, electricity gets sucked away by something it was not originally designed for. I demand electricity be used only for light bulbs! Right...
    • You can opt for (or have foreced on you...) a "lower bandwidth" that makes sense. Most hotspots can manage something like 10 or so 20-30kbps streams- and that's really, really all you need for a better than mobile phone quality session. G.711's nuts. G.729, GSM, or SPEEX will do a much better job at 8-16kbps for each voice channel (one up, one down...). Sadly, most of the people doing VoIP are using G.711 because of QoS reasons. It's much more resilliant to dropouts and latencies than the other codecs.

  • The phone in question apparently (Score:4, Informative)

    by General_Corto ( 152906 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:33PM (#11256537)
    So, based on the articles, Vonage will be selling this handset (PDF of details available from page) [utstar.com].
  • I just want a SIP softphone to run on my WiFi Treo [slashdot.org]. Then I can connect to my regular Vonage softphone account. The next step is for Vonage to factor out the special "softphone account", and let me connect from any SIP device (softphone/Treo/PC, ethernet Telephone Adapter/router, etc) for my $25:mo, and they'll take over the world from the circuit telcos.
  • Their softphone is a pretty nifty thing, too, but not worth paying extra for. I've been using them for a while now and love their service. It was nice visiting my parents over the holidays and bringing my PAP2 with me, so my phone line followed me, but paying an extra ten bucks a month to use the soft phone seems silly.

    I'm sure this will be the same way, if not more expensive.

  • Great idea! (Score:5, Funny)

    by word munger ( 550251 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [regnumsd]> on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:35PM (#11256572) Homepage Journal
    Combines the crappiness of VOIP voice transmission with the unreliability of cell phones! Now we just need to get Microsoft in on this to really ruin it!
    • Actually the sound quality is quite good.
    • Sadly this is already happening with my setup. I use a T-Mobile MDA III phone (aka Blue Angel) which has built in 802.11b and runs Windows Mobile. I use the PPC version of Skype to make calls, mostly because of it's excellent routing around firewalls and end-to-end encryption.

      The good: Make free calls to PCs, cheap calls to POTS from airports and bars in far-away places. War-walking the city streets for free long distance is fun!

      The bad: Windows Mobile crashes...ALOT. When using Skype the CPU demand of th
    • No mention of security (the articles don't), I also hope that it has a mini web server to more easily enter a WEP or WPA key, and allow multiple profiles so it can operate from home, work, etc.

      A wireless VoIP phone does sound intruiging, set up a WAP with an outdoor antenna and you can get a phone with a lot more range than typical home cordless phones can get. But it would still be more expensive and you might have more spectrum issues.

      Another problem is that WAPs have inflated range ratings. The 30mW

  • After many a mess with Sprint, and an unwillingness to use any of the other providers, I have been considering using VoIP on a PDA/Cell Phone for some time now.

    The idea is that I would get something like the MDA/XDA III [infosyncworld.com] which is a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Pocket PC that also has a GSM phone radio in it, and install a prepay card for when I need to make a call and there is no Wi-Fi around.

    I don't know how it is in your neck of the woods, but where I live, even the local hick bar advertises that they have Wi-Fi no

  • Nice and cool but.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by EinarH ( 583836 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:41PM (#11256629) Journal
    ..not very convenient. Can you imagine the "yes I'm now within the free wifi AP, call me on my Vonage phone" ?

    I would rather put my money on Skypes future VoIP GSM phone...

    The Spyware/adware could make it suck though. But for convenience and international calls it might be a winner.

  • Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JohnnyCannuk ( 19863 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:54PM (#11256783)
    And, I believe being done in Toronto by Starnix (along with a few other cool things). Remember this? [pbs.org]:

    "That's one PDA doing the job of two desktop PCs, a notebook PC, and three telephones."

    I suspect using a trimode card [customer-p...ent.rtx.dk] with any PDA\Palm\laptop you could home brew your own version of this that could pick up GSM as well.

    Still, pretty interesting...

  • Here's the plan... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by F34nor ( 321515 ) * on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @03:02PM (#11256883)
    1. Everyone with a broadband connection gets a Wifi point and make it free.

    2. Everyone get a VoIP account.

    3. Everyone gets free cellphone service in major metro areas and suburban areas.

    4. WiMax comes out and the coverage increases by miles.

    5. Both Cell phone and POTS companies go out of buisness and are replaced by a pure IP network the opperate as a messure of bandwith density as a mesure of distance from a optical fiber.

    6. anti-profit
  • Though many slashdotters have pointed out that this isn't new, I feel the need to point out that should this begin to succeed, Nintendo and Sony will mop the floor with this thing.

  • Advocating SIP [gigaom.com]

    Advocating a better connected lifestyle [theappleblog.com]

    Finally, my Xmas wish: The Ultimate Handheld device [blogspot.com] for, now, 2005.

    We don't need numbers to get in real-time touch with one-another. We need smarter devices interconnected with address books, presenting users with actual contact information, and obscuring the means by which you're getting in real-time touch with each-other.

  • It's difficult to choose what side to be on after thinking seriously about it. Of course you want communications to get cheaper and cheaper, but we *need* big telecom companies to provide us the very services that make this sort of thing possible. If free wireless calling takes off and starts being perceived as a dangerous trend, telecoms will fight tooth and nail to prevent this -- through regulation, infringement suits, whatever.

    They will be fighting a losing battle. But even so I have to say, someo

  • Somebody pinch me! (Score:3, Funny)

    by WebCowboy ( 196209 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @04:09PM (#11257685)
    A new wireless phone product that isn't about

    * being powered by Windows
    * playing music and annoying ringtones
    * takes even more megapixels of pics than ever before!
    * plays microscopic video

    No--it's about a phone that...get ready for it...improves the ability to make phone calls! What a new and novel idea! It's about F***in' time, and I have to say that this is the first phone that has piqued my interest in a long time.
  • Mentioning VoIP does anyone know of any cheap VoIP service that can be used for the once a day calls my Tivo makes, obviously needs adapter, but very few minutes will be used.

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