UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS TECH TIP
Product review: USB Cordless DUALPhone provides easy Skype access
Ed Tittel
10.13.2005
Rating: -4.86- (out of 5)
Product: USB Cordless DUALPhone
Product description: Advanced IP telephone with built-in POTS and Skype VoIP service access capabilities; one base station supports up to four handsets.
Class: Small office/home office communications, suitable for home, home office or small remote office situations.
Company: DUALPhone
Cost: Retail pricing is $139.99 at the dualphone-us.com online shopping page (not yet available through third-party retailers).
You'll love this product if: you need a compact, do-it-all cordless Skype/POTS handset.
You won't if: more than four handsets or support for multiple POTS lines is needed (each base station supports a maximum of four handsets and only one POTS line).
Home or small office/branch office users might find the cordless DUALPhone for Skype of great interest. This cordless handset works with a conventional POTS line, but also works with a USB 2.0 link to place and receive calls using the Skype VoIP service through an Internet-connected Windows PC running Windows 2000, XP or 2003.
While its list price of about $140 may seem a bit steep, you get a lot of functionality for the money, for about $70-100 more than what you'd pay for a similar POTS-only cordless phone with a full-featured set of VoIP capabilities. And of course, because you can also use the SkypeIn an
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d SkypeOut services to receive and place calls from phones outside the Skype service, this provides a pretty complete phone solution for SOHO users.
This phone has a wealth of features and functions that include the following, among many others. See the DUALPhone features page for complete details.
The Skype service provides its own internal directory and access services, in addition to conventional VoIP message-handling and call-forwarding services, so together the phone and the service make a nice combination.
The DUALPhone is absurdly easy to configure, install and deploy, provided you've already got a Skype account, or are willing to take up to five minutes to sign up and handle the confirmation e-mail you'll receive to finish that process. Because it aims at a specific service (Skype), the phone essentially bypasses provisioning issues altogether, making it suitable for use in small office/home situations. In essence, the phone creates a total "plug-and-call" solution right out of the box.
Ed Tittel is a regular contributor to numerous TechTarget Web sites, and the author of over 100 books on a wide range of computing subjects from markup languages to information security. He's also a contributing editor for Certification Magazine, and edits Que Publishing's Exam Cram 2 and Training Guide series of cert prep books. E-mail Ed at etittel@techtarget.com.
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