Pauldy's House of Geek

Well it has been a week and finally arrived this evening. I’ve been playing with this little voip device now for the majority of the night. I must say from an engineering standpoint I’m fairly impressed. From a users standpoitn I’m underwhelmed. The potential is there but some key interface issues leave a lot to be desired on this phone. For one the speakerphone is worthless. I get better calls using x-ten on my PC. This coupled with the various interface bugs and items that simply seem as if they just weren’t thought through at all makes this device less than stellar.

After saying all that the geek in me can’t help but love it. It does work for placing and recieving calls. It allows for use of up to 4 lines and intagrates with my asterisk server very well. I’m using the power over ethernet adapter from a linksys POE12V adapter and it works wonderfully. The device supports 802.3af which from the non ieee members means the power is actually carried by the ethernet cable into the phone. No lame power bricks that convert from 802.3af back to plain old ethernet and a pigtail power plug. 1-wire to the phone is all that is needed. I’ve been running this config for a while now and it has been stable enough that I’m possitive it is working as promissed in their documentation.

Another thing I liked about the phone is the styling. At first I was bumbed about the placement of the LCD screen. that is until I realized the LCD screen itself was adjustable. Once I figured that out I had the screen adjusted for my desk in no time. The adjustment seems to be very sturdy too. I don’t think in 2 or three years it will be sagging and unable to hold its own weight. A must for this phone update to 1.09 at the very least. When I first tested with the phone it was running 1.08 and the interface was even worse and I was seriously considering returning the unit. After the update many of the anoyances were taken care of most importantly was the CID display which seemed to be capped at 1 line. Now you have the full 4 line display giving you the stats of what line your on what account your using the caller name and number. A much better design than what was available in 1.08.

Once configed I setup a downloadable config file using their configuration software which is very misleading. It is not config software. It mearly translates a flat file you create from a template on their site to a binarry packed file that is used for the config.

I will post some more info about this phone later I’ll be checking out if I can assign the tfptboot server via dhcp later on.