Messenger Phone

August 3, 2006

First up, let me say a big thank you to Romain at Heaven, and Phil Holden, from the second Windows Live session who sent me this new toy.

It’s the Philips VOIP433 Messenger Phone, a dual device that can make ordinary calls via a land line, or if you link the base station up to your PC running Windows Live Messenger, make and receive all your messenger Internet calls.

Having spend the last few hours playing around with it, these are my thoughts.

Packaging

The phone comes in a rather multicultural box, with all the text in at least three different languages. Inside the box is pretty much the normal level of packaging, so I wont bother going into any detail about this whatsoever. Let’s just say that I’ve seen things arrive in presentation cases, and this is not one of them.

What you get

The package consists of three main parts. One rather ordinary looking, cordless digital phone; matching charger with a Windows Live Messenger sticker hastily attached to the front; and the rather sleek, slimline base station, with all the wires sticking out of it.

Connections

You plug the base station into the wall, the telephone line, and your PC. The charging unit also needs to be plugged into the wall. Now I can see some benefit to being able to put the charger separate from the base unit, but for me, I just have to ask why. I’m a computer geek, I have about two dozen things plugged into the wall at any one time via a probably less than safe mass of extension leads and cables. So when I get a new toy that’s USB connected and requires not one but two wall sockets, a little part of me dies inside.

That said, the base station does to well to hide the wires from you as much as possible. Everything connects to the underside of the device, and is piped through a few channels, before neatly extruding from one corner.

Installation

Installing this phone is a piece of cake. You plug it in, and I assume the drivers are distributed with WLM itself, because there are no driver CDs, or downloads required. The add new device wizard ran a couple of times for each of the phones USB interfaces, and that was it.

I had only two minor issues with the installation, but they were easily resolved. After I installed the drivers, I had no sound. Since I’d just moved my PC from uni to back home, and hadn’t yet used audio, I ran through the normal diagnostic processes, and couldn’t find any problem with the hardware or software. I then checked the Sounds and Audio Devices applet, to find that windows had moved my default audio device from the SoundBlaster sound card, to the VOIP phone. A bizarre thing to do, but easy to change, and sound returned instantaneously.

The second issue was a strange \”PC SOFTWARE NOT RUNNING\” message on the phone whenever I pressed the WLM button. It took me a long while to suss, but it was very clearly my own stupidity that caused it. Whenever you connect the phone to the PC, you get an XP autorun dialog popup, with two choices. One has a phone icon, and the other is the take no action icon. I instinctively clicked the no action icon, and clicked ok, assuming the phone icon was for making a call, or some other such silly action that I’d never normally want to take. It was however the enable/disable function for the phone. Once you plug the phone in and accept this autorun box, you get a nice little phone icon in the system tray, and the WLM button on the handset does what you would expect.

Using the phone

As a land line phone, usage is completely self explanatory. If you’ve ever used a phone before then this one is no different.

As a VOIP phone, it’s actually pretty simple to use.

First up, I ran the Audio and Video Setup wizard in WLM, and set the phone to be my default speaker/microphone device. Then all you have to do to call someone is press the WLM button on the handset, navigate to the group the contact is in, then select the contact in the list and press the call button.

If you receive a call invite from a contact, the phone automatically starts ringing, and you can pick up, or cancel the invite from the handset. There are no hoops to jump through in this regard.

One slight oddity, is that if you use WLM on your PC to start the call, it doesn’t get routed through to the handset. This means you must have the handset to hand in order to make a call; you can’t say start the call from the PC, then pick up the handset to start talking.

Also, and I suppose understandably, when you make a call using the handset, a conversation window to that contact is automatically opened, with and the invite in it sent.

Conclusions

If you make a lot of telephone calls, most of whom are on your messenger contact list, then this phone is for you. It replaces your traditional land line phone, but offers you free calls to your IM contacts.

Pros:

• Easy to set up and use
• Cheaper calls over VOIP

Cons:

• Only worth spending money on if you often call people on your WLM list, either VOIP or normally
• Requires your PC to be in reach of a telephone socket to make normal calls, and your PC to be on to make VOIP calls.
• You can only VOIP call people on your WLM contact list, so far as I am aware

Filed under: Windows Live |