On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 10:45 +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
Yes, I've not been too happy with the convenience of a soft phone, although with better headset this may improve. One thing I've been on the lookout for is a wifi based SIP handset, but every handset you see advertised is a Skype one. I've no idea whether this means the phone is 100% tied to Skype, but I'm assuming so (and questions asked of suppliers and manufacturers that have resulted in either a blank stare that indicates they have no idea what you are talking about, or no email response at all seems to confirm this).
Linksys and a few others at digium.co.uk but my experience with the ones I tried was not that great. If you only want it for use at your base and not roaming on other peoples wifi (they don't work so well with paid for hot spots anyway and often SIP requires firewall tweakery before it works anyway so this limits use on public wifi) I'd look towards a SIP/Dect phone rather than a SIP/Wifi one.
Siemens Gigaset C460IP available at digium.co.uk for £69+VAT , tis dual mode SIP and POTS. We have one of those in our workshop and it is fine (apart from lacking dedicated transfer buttons etc for asterisk but that won't affect you) One particularly nice thing about it is that even in the single handset pack the charger and base station are separate units so you don't have to place the phone on charge where the phone line and network point is.
Oh and batteries on the Gigaset are standard nimh AAA batteries so replacement is cheap if/when they do fail.
My hard wired handset on the business line is a Plantronics unit with a headset attached. The volume on the headset is very poor and I have it at maximum to be able to use it (I'd like it a bit louder). I also find that the in-line connector needs a wiggle every now and then to get anything out of it. I really must try to sort out cleaning the connections.
Most plantronics headsets are designed to plug into a dedicated headset port. Is this what you have or do you have one of those funny loopthrough things on the telephone headset...I have some dedicated plantronics headset amplifiers kicking about somewhere from when we have decommissioned old phone systems, if I can find a working one you are welcome to it.