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Hardware Hacking Communications Upgrades Software Linux

Resurrected Full-Screen VoIP Phones 92

Posted by timothy from the device-of-the-future-of-the-past dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Looking for a suitable VoIP phone, I came across these Full-Screen Thin-Client Phones. Not only do they do voice, but they also have a 480x640 screen running at 65K colors and run a number of apps remotely via VNC. They seem to allow a lot more functionality than normal phones, and look really cool too. The site says they have 70 phones running in their office. This seems the way forward for telephony-computer convergence in the 21st century. A document at the end of the page explains their approach and has some cool pictures as well."
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Resurrected Full-Screen VoIP Phones More

Resurrected Full-Screen VoIP Phones

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  • The question is.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05, 2005 @08:55PM (#11586513)
    To pre-empt the question of whether it runs Linux...

    The Broadband Phone (BBPhone) is basically a Strong-ARM 1100, with 8MB of flash, 32MB of RAM, touchscreen, 10Mbps Ethernet and a sound card running a derivative of the Linux 2.2 kernel.

    w00t!

  • 5 Years Late (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @08:55PM (#11586517)
    With this affordable video phone, now all I need is a practical hover car and society's promises of things I would have by the year 2000 will be complete.

    Better late than never, I guess!

  • Article Text Without FUD (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

  • Fire a up a server with multiple x-windows sessions, put these around the house.

    Sprinkle in a HTPC..

    add a pinch of x10

    You have a hella integrated house.

    Actually the HTPC could be the server.. sweet.

  • Finally (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @09:00PM (#11586535) Homepage Journal
    With one of these, why would I need a "tablet PC"? Just give me VNC windows to remote servers, with cut/paste between my windows. All I want near me is a multimedia client, anyway - all the unique data and compute horsepower should be on networked servers I can hit from anywhere I login. Are we there yet?

  • Go Linux go...! (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 )
    I am very pleased and happy to learn from the article, that these phones have lots to do with Linux. What can I say? Go Linux go...!

  • Prototypes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @09:08PM (#11586579) Journal
    The article only contains a few sentences, so it's hard to tell either way, but I get the impression these are prototypes left over from AT&T Research. In that case this is hardly a product you can buy off the shelf, which is the impression the Slashdot story gives.

    Dan East

    • Re:Prototypes? (Score:5, Informative)

      by stab ( 26928 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @09:41PM (#11586751) Homepage
      You're right, they are left over equipment from AT&T Labs Cambridge, which were redeployed in the Laboratory for Communication Engineering [cam.ac.uk] at the University of Cambridge.

      But they're more than prototypes, the phones work really well even six years after being built (mainly due to their thin-client architecture, as only the servers need to be upgraded to run more complex services, not the edge phone hardware).

      It's a bit of a shock to see this randomly show up on Slashdot, but for those interested readers, here's a WIP paper [recoil.org] about what we're doing with them these days (using the Active Bat [att.com] location system to migrate mobile phone calls via Bluetooth to the nearest environmental phone among other things).
      As I said, the paper is very much WIP, and is being hacked up after being freshly rejected from a conference so the link is liable to disappear :-) Feel free to get in touch with the main man behind the phones, Rip Soham, if you are interested in more details (contact details in the link).

      As far as I know, no commercially available VoIP phone uses VNC these days, which is a real pity as its a really neat way to offer easily upgradable services to the end user (forget running mobile code on the edge device, compute power is cheap these days).
      • As far as I know, no commercially available VoIP phone uses VNC these days, which is a real pity

        The window behind my browser is a VNC session over a VPN to work... the VNC server has been up for months now. It's a robust bit o' code that I agree should be used more widely.

        Thanks for the additional info, it's good to hear about the labs working on yet more cool tech.

        - Leo
        • same here, my main pc is in the closet, and i vnc into it over ethernet to do any real work from my laptop, the only thing my laptop is light web browsing and playing movies(streamed off of the server of course.) only real problem is i lose windows becuase i forget which desktop i left them on!

      • Re:Prototypes? (Score:3, Informative)

        by stab ( 26928 )
        Sigh, wish you could edit Slashdot posts.

        The correct link to the department is:
        Laboratory for Communication Engineering [cam.ac.uk], and the correct name is Rip Sohan (sorry!)
      • As far as I know, no commercially available VoIP phone uses VNC these days, which is a real pity as its a really neat way to offer easily upgradable services to the end user (forget running mobile code on the edge device, compute power is cheap these days).

        Yeah, that's actually a pretty neat idea. I just modified one of my web apps at work to work with the Cisco IP phones, which are all XML-based (and not very smart about parsing certain things). Being able to set up a VNC session to a server running the
      • Feel free to get in touch with the main man behind the phones, Rip [Sohan], if you are interested in more details (contact details in the link).
        I hope Rip Sohan can handle a good Slashdotting!

    • Re:Prototypes? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DietCoke ( 139072 )
      That's most of the problem. I'd love to throw a system like this together as a project at work, but if the hardware's going to be difficult to replace it takes away a ton of value from my argument *for* implementing it.

      I'd assume that someone will latch onto this idea on a more common platform a lot sooner than later. The inclusion of VNC expands what you can do, too.

      Imagine this: Those "phones" could be outfitted with higher-quality sound. As you walk by one (ie. RFID or something of that sort), it l

  • Run apps on your telephone? (Score:3, Informative)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @09:11PM (#11586588) Homepage
    640x480 resolution and what could be an akward user interface. Not only that, but you have to use VNC in order to really do anything at all. Yeah, it's a cool device, but it never had any real world potential. Can you honestly see this taking over in corporate America with the non-geeks? I can't.

    The new Vonage WiFi phone is the closest thing to something like this that will actually have potential. Around here, there are a lot of WiFi points that are free. I can go to almost any of the locally owned coffee shops and get free WiFi access. Now that has some potential, emphasis on some.
    • Speaking as a corporate America drone, this thing looks better than the phone I currently have on my desk. My phone has no screen at all, which makes it difficult to use any of the advanced features. One use that immediately comes to mind for a phone with a good screen is looking up people in my phonebook, although maybe it would be better to just do this on a desktop computer and have some way for the computer to dial the phone for you. Oh wait, did you say non-geek? Never mind.

      WiFi seems orthogonal to th
    • Where I work, everyone loves the IP phones, even though they have B&W displays. I think it's the "I am working on the set of a sci-fi film" effect. Every time I answer my phone, this HUD slides over the screen with the caller's name, number, blood type, vulnerabilities, whether or not they're associated with John Connor, etc.

      One of the example apps in the SDK was one that added a file photo and LDAP information about them.

      Most of these features are totally useless most of the time, but it looks cool t
  • But with something that will be staying on the desk - why not create software for a computer? Well, I'm sure the company knows it'll make more money by selling hardware, but aren't there programs like this for computers?

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

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      Because computers lock up.
      They can get bogged down running an app.
      Do you want a phone that is as reliable as your computer? Think about it. It is not good to put all your eggs in one basket.
    • The main reason for having separate phones and computers is so that you can call the help desk when your computer is down. :-)
      • The main reason for having separate phones and computers is so that you can call the help desk when your computer is down. :-)

        Or to call my good friends at Comcast when the Internet is down ;-)

  • I Want My AT&T (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @09:18PM (#11586631) Homepage Journal
    This stuff at AT&T Cambridge was all running in 2001, before AT&T shut down the lab. It all seems like an extremely easy to use system, made of standard protocols and formats that could plug into all our other systems. Why did it die? Why do companies like AT&T collapse after investing time, money and brains into this kind of innovation, and bringing forth only more complicated phonebills?
    • Same thing you coulda asked Xerox a quarter century ago...

    • Re:I Want My AT&T (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jburroug ( 45317 )
      Why do companies like AT&T collapse after investing time, money and brains into this kind of innovation

      In this case because the US government decided to kill it. Read the history of it here [bellsystemmemorial.com] That's why you don't have your innovative AT&T anymore, the feds killed it pretty much out of spite. Then they killed it some more by allowing the Baby Bells to raise the rates they charged AT&T for connecting calls into what is essentially the network AT&T built in the first place! Which is why AT
      • I don't get it. Because the Feds forced Bell to compete? I had dinner Friday night with a guy (still successful) who worked at AT&T in the late 1970s - early 80s, and we talked about this same question. He told me all kinds of stories about how AT&T just wasn't set up to compete; the "empire" collapsed when the new economics were applied. This particular collapse, and the innovations it lost, were all started and finished years after the breakup was completed, which AT&T (and everyone else) had
  • I wonder about the quality of these phones. Does anyone know how they compare to today's VoIP phones (such as the ones offered by Vonage)?
    • Vonage doesn't make IP phones - they make telephone adapters which convert typical analog phone signals into IP. The question you ask is still valid, though...

  • VOIPix ?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @09:25PM (#11586677)
    I have bookoo Pentium 133's laying around.
    I think it would be most excellent if someone were to make up a knoppix distro that only exists to be a VOIP client, such as Damn Small Linux doing VOIP..

    If someone were to come up with something to turn old POS pc's into dedicated voip boxes that would be pretty interesting..

    Just my .02 cents..

  • Similar cheap platforms to experiment with: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Aphrika ( 756248 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @09:36PM (#11586733)
    The Microsoft Smart Display (SD) technology that appeared a couple of years ago.

    When I first heard about it, the idea of what was essentially a touchscreen terminal attached wirelessly to your desktop seemed to open a huge number of possibilities, VoIP telephony being one of them. Ultimately, Smart Displays failed - one of the main reasons being the price and the simultaneous release of the Tablet PC which was similar, yet gave much more VFM. The SD tended to be based around CE.NET running on an ARM chip with around 32MB of RAM if I remember correctly.

    So, although these 70-odd phones at the Cambridge labs are unique (you can't buy them commercially), there exists out there a large number of devices with ARM chips, touchscreens and WiFi that are capable of doing this kind of thing. You can probably pick them up cheap now so modifying a secondhand SD device may be a neat way to get started...
  • You'll need them on both ends, of course. And you're more likely to be calling people who have (or can be persuaded to get) a Mac and an iSight, or something comparable on the PC side, than ones who have these admittedly nifty but scarcer-than-hens-teeth gizmos.

    • Re:Nice, but... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Wesley Felter ( 138342 )
      If you have the right gateway, a SIP phone can call any regular phone. I don't see what an iSight has to do with it; these are screen phones, not video phones.
      • Oops, you're right. These are just plain ordinary (well, SIP) phones that happen to have screens. My bad. I thought they were something more.

        Oh well.

  • Perhaps.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zakezuke ( 229119 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @09:50PM (#11586800)
    With a phone like this telemarketing drones could actually see the timezone they are calling rather than the current system of "how am i suppose to know it's 5am where you at".

  • It's better... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    to help people than garden gnomes!

  • Where they intended to be voip or just web phones? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @10:25PM (#11587026) Homepage
    I've got 200 or so analog web phones sitting in a warehouse (make me an offer suckers?) that had a voice modem and handset and a web browser and touch screen. The software developers went broke before it ever got all the bugs out (like ssl -- what ssl?) and so the phones sit in their boxes.

    The voice modem option of the ones I have should be fast enough to do voip (if they had an ethernet interface but that never happened either) or run linux but I never got around to hacking them in any useful way.

    There was lots of technology from a few years back that was hunting for a market that they never found.
  • Does that poster's write-up seem a little to glowing to any of you as well?
  • I can't believe that nobody picked up on the fact that this is very similar to the cisco voip phone, which now supports videoconferencing, and is entirely driven by the backend server.

    • Re:reminds me... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by zmanea ( 656739 )
      What a 7970? A 7970 looks like it should be a video phone but it isn't. About the only thing usefull you can do with that color LCD is browse the internet, but who is going to do that when they are sitting in front of a computer. If you want to do a video conference you will need to purchase the VT software and a webcam.

  • Bandwith Usage (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mallfouf ( 585018 )
    Does anyone know how much bandwith does a net phone consumes during a call? I wasn't able to find that info anywhere. thanks.
  • I want one!!!

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