iPhone Digital Hub Device and Software

geobe

We have seen iMovie, iDVD, iTunes & iPhoto make all these once complex tasks simplier and easy to use. They have become practical, useful and the envy of both software and hardware manufacturers throughout the industry.



This should be next....!



However, the initial iPhone has already been created and abandoned by Microsoft. Does anyone remember the MicroSoft Cordless Phone. This is/was a great concept, however, one that can be improved upon and made simplier by Apple. Here is the specs.....



Microsoft® Cordless Phone System



OverviewManage your calls using the power of our PC. The Microsoft Cordless Phone System uses your PC to help you manage your busy life with a sophisticated voice-mail system, Voice Command dialing and new ways to handle incoming calls.



The Call Manager software included gives you sophisticated voice mail, Voice Command dialing, and enhanced caller ID features. Benefits You can easily place calls by simply saying a short phrase, like "call Mom." Create a flexible voice-mail system with individual mailboxes. Create private greetings for each caller to personalize your voice-mail system. Hear the incoming caller's name before you pick up the phone with Caller ID Announce. Retrieve voice mail messages from anywhere, and get notified of new or urgent messages at your cell phone or pager. Prioritize special callers, automatically sending other callers to voice mail or block unwanted callers altogether.



Standard Features

Sophisticated voice mail and message management The Microsoft Cordless Phone System gives you multiple voice mailboxes, so you can direct callers to the appropriate mailbox, for business or personal use, for any member of the family.



Voice Command dialing Voice Command allows you to place calls by simply speaking into your phone. With Voice Command, you'll never have to remember another phone number. Just say the name of the person you want to call and Voice Command will dial for you.



Enhanced caller ID features:

Create custom announcements for incoming calls, block unwanted calls, give special callers higher priority, and create individual greetings. Have your phone and PC announce the name of the person calling, so you can take the call or send it to voice mail.

900MHz radio frequency The 40 channel, 900MHz cordless phone gives you greater range and clarity than a standard cordless phone. Enjoy static free phone conversations from any room in the house.



Call History:

The Call Manager software logs all incoming and outgoing calls to and from the Microsoft Phone System, giving you a complete record of your phone activity.



Remote message notification and access:

When you're away from your home or office, the Microsoft Phone System can notify you of important messages on your cell phone, pager or at a remote phone number. You can also easily check messages by dialing from a remote location.



================================



Combine this with the personal PBX software-hardware. <a href="http://www.talkswitch.com/"; target="_blank">http://www.talkswitch.com/</a>; has a device around the same size as your DSL modem or personal hub/gateway.



Combine all this together while using the Airport Base Station as the base for the phone and you have once very useful and practical device. Of course it could work without your computer on, by why would you want to...



Any thoughts?

zoso

I know the US cell market is pretty different than the EU, so I can't really speak for it.



But here Apple would be simply blown away by those huge monsters called Nokia, Ericsson [add another dozen of manufacturers here] and Motorola itself!



Not going to happen here, or if it does happen it's gonna be a bigger flop than the Cube.



Besides, to use the 900 MHz frequency it'd have to be a full-fledged cell phone--here they transmit at 900 and 1800 MHz...



Sorry--interesting concept though...



&lt;edit&gt;I think that not only manufacturers, but operators too (like Vodafone, just to name the biggest) would slit the throat of such a product.&lt;/edit&gt;



ZoSo



[ 06-16-2002: Message edited by: ZoSo ]



[ 06-16-2002: Message edited by: ZoSo ]</p>

geobe

This was a cordless home phone. 900mhz DSS I think.





To make things even more interesting. Cellular One used to have a phone that when within 150 feet it worked as your regular home phone. When you left the house, it changed service over to cellular service. The phone and plan was called Talk-n-Go.



They have canceled this too and a combination of the purposed iPhone and Talk-n-Go would be an incredibly useful Digital Hub.

zoso

[quote]Originally posted by geobe:

<strong>a combination of the purposed iPhone and Talk-n-Go would be an incredibly useful Digital Hub.</strong><hr></blockquote>



Not here and not for the price that Apple would charge for it--for the same amount of ?? you could probably get a top-of-the-line Nokia or Ericsson. Prices here are so low--for handsets AND voice/SMS traffic--that nobody would be able to see the benefit of another device.



Well, excluding maybe 350 Apple fanatics--including me!



ZoSo

jonathan brisby

Airport would be out of the question. There are a million technical reasons why... and I don't care to go into them. Also the current modems on all the new macs don't support the 'voice through' features like the old telecom tools used to let you do. I tinkered with a similar idea using a 486, 2 modems, a 16 cell lcd, a pbx emulator and a butt load of scripting. The end result was a beast that would work 1% of the time. I also monkied with the voice recognition in OS 9 to allow 'tone dialing' from a remote keypad. The idea being to dial tones in the air, have the mac pick up the tones, and then dial it out on the modem and turn on the speaker phone. Overall your idea is 'nifty' but not practical. Digital hub after all has little to do with the phone. At least music is "digital" you get "digital photos" and movies are definatly digital (DVD). How is phone even related?



Just my thoughts.

drewprops

No guys, I remember the telephone he's talking about.



It was a pretty neat idea, a convergence between a cordless home phone and your PC's contacts list. Add a person to your contact list and your phone automatically has that information available for you as you stroll around the house. Need to call Jim Peabody with Wonder Gadgets Inc? He's in the phone. No more navigating the dumbass data entry interfaces that come with today's telephones.



I was somewhat surprised to see that product fail. Now, never having used this specific device I'm at risk at asserting that the technology didn't fail, but I feel that what failed was the support BEHIND the product. Microsoft didn't know how to sell the damned thing. It should've been advertised in PEOPLE magazine and LADIES HOME JOURNAL and USA TODAY. It wasn't promoted properly PLUS the user-base wasn't yet sophisticated enough to recognize the benefits of this system.



I'd be surprised to see anybody make another pass at this technology, but damn, it sure would be nifty.



Drew

thai moof

You really have to be kidding. For home use this is overkill. How many different numbers do you have? Grandma and Grandpa Jones, Grandma and Grandpa Smith, kids at college (or whatever), a couple friends. When you call them, you hit the speed dial button and thats it. Why would I want to boot up my machine, start up the iphone app, then speak "Call Grandma Jones", when I could simply lift the phone off the hook and hit speed dial?



However, for a business, this could work well, because you not only have the phone number, but information as well. I can see it working here.

drewprops

&lt;ahem&gt;

some of us have a LOT of friends

buonrotto

fahgeddaboutit. too tired.



[ 06-17-2002: Message edited by: BuonRotto ]</p>

scott f.

As I said before.. I'd be happy with a solution that allowed me (us) to manage our CURRENT flow of TelData on OSX. I'd love to be able to Make & Receive calls, view caller I.D., Manage voice mailboxes, send, receive & view faxes, utilize Address Book in faxing & calling... ALL from my Mac's desktop via software.



How about notification of receipt of calls or faxes...? I leave my home office... I receive a fax I've been waiting for... my Mac calls my cell phone (or any number I determine) or sends a text message indicating the fax has arrived.



Let me manage my TelData better... hey, here's a thought... LET ME SYNC ALL MY DEVICES TO ADDRESS BOOK!!!!



I have info in Apple's Address Book, I have info on my Palm Vx, I have info on my cell phone... How about letting them share and update all the SAME INFO!!! I shouldn't have to go to ALL those places to change ONE phone number *sigh*.



Okay... [ end rant ]

digix

Apple once do this sort of thing, named Apple Phone, and it was for the AV Macs back in the mid 90's.



Anyway. Apple's products had the habit of being reincarnated in the future (IDC -&gt; ADC), so it's no doubt that it probably will show up again. Probably into something like iChat, or even integrated into iChat.



And it's probable that Apple will want to be more active in the telecommunication area.



?Apple, Ericsson and Sun Team to Create Standards-Based, Wireless Content Delivery Solution?



<a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/feb/12wireless.html"; target="_blank">http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/feb/12wireless.html</a>;

ginjg

and what was SJ talking about at MWSF when he was demoing QT6 - a joint project with erickson and as I remember Sony?

ginjg

and what was SJ talking about at MWSF when he was demoing QT6 - a joint project with erickson and as I remember Sony?

vvvince

the real issue is how to share contacts, SMS chat... between your mac, your home phone, your fax machine and your mobile phone. This is becoming a huge mess, even worse if you want to share it with friends and familie.



Add to this the increased fonctionnality in cellular phone (my Ericson T65 has an agenda, a post it fonctionnality, future phones will be able to download and manage java software). And no management software for the macintosh.



Bluetooth will provide the channel, Apple must provide the intelligence

yurin8or

[quote]Originally posted by VVVince:

<strong>

Bluetooth will provide the channel, Apple must provide the intelligence</strong><hr></blockquote>



dont confuse bluetooth with 802.11. Bluetooth is more than just the channel...check out the profile specs.

eddively

Welll...here are some interesting factoids.

Apple announced a combined effort with Sun, and ...was it Motorola? to create some sort of communicatin network, they announced this a while ago, with no updates.

secondly

<a href="http://www.iphone.org"; target="_blank">http://www.iphone.org</a>;

still transfers to apple's homepage.

I am for one waiting on exactly what Apple wanted from this whole deal.

hmph.

convertedfrompc

I don't know, the whole idea of contacts seems silly to me. Most phones today will store plenty of numbers and even address' and on top of that you can have multiple numbers per name, for even more functionality. If your sick of typing them in by hand you can enter them on your computer once and then transfer them to your phone via a port and cable (most phones these days have an OEM cable that you can purchase for this). In the states there are even services through companies like Nextel (like I have, if you subscribe to the service) that will let you store hundreds of contacts online and you can access them anywhere you have service, you can even turn around and message them or email the person if need be. I can also access my outlook through their servers and have the information such as new mail or contacts relayed to my phone or online if I'm at a computer. The ideas you guys have are good ones, but really, there are plenty of options out there already, and in a perfect environment where cellular service is abundant, you would only use your cell phone instead of a home phone because you can get long distance included, as well as voice mail and caller id at no extra charge, then use cable internet through the cable (that you might already have) company you already use. I've personally already taken this approach for the most part, and so my phone is always with me nomatter where I go, plus if I please I can have a second line added to the same phone so I can switch between business and personal. Anyway, just my $ .02.



-CFPC

zoso

[quote]Originally posted by yurin8or:

<strong>dont confuse bluetooth with 802.11. Bluetooth is more than just the channel...check out the profile specs.</strong><hr></blockquote>



I still have to see a 802.11-enabled cell phone, while there are plenty of Bluetooth phones. The channel he was referring to is obviously the way the phone communicates to a PC, ie: Bluetooth.



ZoSo

drewprops

Three things.



FIRST

I would love for ConvertedFromPCto give us some links to where we can purchase these cables and corresponding software packages that allow us to sync our Macs to our cellular telephones. The last time I checked, the cables were not available for many telephones and the software had to be downloaded from a separate website. Is there now a total package for this stuff?





SECOND

There are a legion of reasons that people will continue to use traditional land-line telephone services. Expecting this most commonly used item to be more easily managed is not a strange request.



THIRD

Why hasn't the telephone industry gotten "computerized" and taken advantage of v-card information in consumer phones? Have any of YOU seen consumer phones that allow you to update their internal address books via USB or by Memory Stick? That last bit, the memory stick, is where I've been waiting and watching for Sony to bring that technology to their consumer telephones. Just stick the card in your computer's card reader, transfer the data, pull out the card, stick it into your phone's reader and hit UPDATE. How cool would that be?



Okay....I'm going to stroll over and see if Sony has that NOW...and if they use an industry standard like v-card or if they've designed their own damned proprietary format that means that someone will have to write a Mac-compatible app to allow us to hack their phone.....assuming it exists, which it won't, which pisses me off, which prompts me to end this post.



D