Reviews

Fringe on FOX

July 1, 2008

Speaking of fring (blogged earlier today), there is a cool new TV series called Fringe which comes out this Fall created by American Emmy Award-winning film and television producer, writer, actor, composer, and director J.J. Abrams. J.J. Abrams also wrote and produced for the popular TV show Lost, including the opening sequence in the first episode of Lost where the plane breaks apart in mid-air.

Apparently Abrams hates planes since in the opening sequence in Fringe involves a plane that lands "intact" but all of its occupants are dead and the inside of the plane is bloody, dark, and eerie.

Posted in Home Entertainment, Reviews, TMCnet, Technology and Science, VoIP, Wireless

Dell Video Chat Launches

June 26, 2008

Today, Dell will launch Dell Video Chat powered by SightSpeed, which will be pre-bundled on all consumer Dell PCs. Landing Dell is a major win for SightSpeed, a competitor to Skype, Microsoft Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and others.

I spoke with Eric Quanstrom, Vice President of Marketing for Sightspeed about this major annoucement. I also installed Dell Video Chat to check it out for myself, so I'll include some screenshots along the way.

Eric said, "We've been bundled with camera manufactureres before but we've never been resident on OEM PC hardware.

Posted in Reviews, SIP, Skype, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP, p2p

SightSpeed Business Upgrade Adds 9-way Video

June 23, 2008

Today, SightSpeed will announce a significant upgrade to SightSpeed Business, which was launched last fall. The new version offers simultaneous 9-way video and text chat. I'm a huge fan of SightSpeed, which doesn't get nearly the amount of attention that Skype gets yet has some features Skype lacks. Check out my 2006 review of SightSpeed 5.0.

Posted in Reviews, SIP, Skype, TMCnet, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Asterisk With Office Communications Server 2007

May 27, 2008

Asterisk integration with Office Communications Server 2007 is a popular topic in the unified communications community. You wouldn't think integrating an open source Linux-based solution (Asterisk) with Microsoft's proprietary OCS 2007 UC platform would be popular, but it is. In fact, I have my ear to both the Microsoft OCS 2007 community and the Asterisk community and the integration of these two worlds is something I hear all the time. Some within the Asterisk community poo-poo the thought of integrating with Microsoft OCS 2007.

Posted in Asterisk, Linux, Microsoft, Reviews, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

snom m3 DECT SIP Phone Coming to North America

May 19, 2008

In late 2007, snom announced the snom m3 DECT wireless SIP phone. snom sent me a review unit a few months ago to review and alas it's been sitting on my large pile of VoIP products to check out. The m3 is a cool looking phone and very gadgety, so usually I would have torn into the box and played with it the same day I got it, but if I set aside other projects every time I got a cool gadget, I'd never get anything done.

Well, I finally had time to install and test the snom m3 and hope to write a review soon. For now, I'd like to share today's news that the snom m3 wireless VoIP Phone now being generally available in North America.

Posted in Asterisk, Reviews, SIP, TMCnet, VoIP, Wireless

Druid 1.2.0-3 Launches

May 13, 2008

Today, Druid 1.2.0-3, an open source Asterisk-based solution was launched. (Check out my full review of the Asterisk-based Druid platform for some background.) Here's a screenshot of their web-based front-end that makes it easy to manage their version of Asterisk:

Vikram Rangnekar from Druid shot me off an email saying they have some great new features in Druid. Figured I'd share some important excerpts of his email that explain the news:

In the two months since its been out, We have had a little over a thousand downloads. I'm more than satisfied with how the community is growing we have around 400 people on the forums a little over half of them are quite active, We have a lot of people posting bugs, suggestions and many people actually using Druid OSE in their organizations.

We have a few people porting the Druid RPM's over to Gentoo and SuSE.
We are still finalizing the SOAP API but we have added a ton of new cool stuff.

Posted in Android, Asterisk, Reviews, TMCnet, VoIP

Blackberry 9000 Is Coming Next Week!

May 9, 2008

Exciting news for all Blackberry fans -- seems like the highly touted 9000 is due to be announced May 12!

Take a look at The Boy Genius here (thanks for the photo!) for a bit more and here at Crackberry for a three-part review of the little beauty.

Posted in Reviews, Wireless

SkyFire Review

May 8, 2008

Rich Tehrani has a great review on the SkyFire browser that gives Windows Mobile devices the Apple iPhone browsing experience. Well, not quite, but definitely much better than the built-in Windows Mobile browser. It supports easy zooming, Flash support, videos (including YouTube videos) and more. Rich was getting so frustrated with the crappy Windows Mobile browser that he even weighed the pros and cons of switching to the Apple iPhone from his Verizon HTC 6800 Windows Mobile.

But now Rich is giddier than a kid that just got a PS3 for Christmas, or that blogger who just got an iPhone and can't stop blogging about it.

Posted in Microsoft, Mobile Phones, PDAs & Handhelds, Reviews, TMCnet

Plantronics SupraPlus HW251N-USB Wideband Headset

April 11, 2008

Rich and I reviewed the Plantronics SupraPlus HW251N-USB Wideband headset, featuring wideband codec support for use in VoIP applications such as Skype and Microsoft Office Communicator. Rich actually got two pre-production models and was kind enough to give me one of the SupraPlus headsets. Actually, he wanted me to be his guinea pig to test the audio quality since I get to hear and review quite a few VoIP products.

We tested the monaural style Plantronics SupraPlus HW251N-USB using both Skype and Microsoft Office Communicator. The audio quality was quite good.

Posted in Call Center and CRM, Computer Hardware, Gadgets, Headsets, Reviews, Skype, TMCnet, VoIP

Packet8 Virtual Office Adds Salesforce.com VoIP Plugin

April 9, 2008

Packet8 has always been at the leading edge of cool VoIP applications and products. Packet8 was the first to offer a videophone for their residential VoIP customers (see my review of the Packet8 Videophone) They're had several other firsts to their name along with several patents to boot. Packet8 is like the dark horse when it comes to VoIP. While they don't have their name in lights like big bad Vonage, Packet8 has been slowly growing their customer base while adding cool new features.

Posted in Call Center and CRM, Packet8, Reviews, TMCnet, VoIP

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