To make the long story short my friend, they are crap! Its not true that I did not like the phone due to firmware issues.
I did not like it because of the following issues: a. zero access to latest firmware b. poor or no access over NAT c. does not perform in a Hosted environment d. Inability to keep registrations ongoing e. Sound quality is crap f. Managed to get it working over a LAN exclusively. g. No video / H264 or H263 in the LAN with Asterisk. h. No Web UI to log into. i. A bloody pain in the behind to provision the phone to your userid and password via the number pad. By the time you are done programming the userid and password via the telephone interface and keypad, it will be at least 10 minutes. There is no proper and easy support for this on Asterisk, contrary to other people's claims. It does work, flawlessly on sipX and Nortel platforms. Well... it better be working on Nortel platforms because its made by Nortel. Yes, people have had success - but extremely limited success on Asterisk (and that too within a LAN only). They are not cheap if you are using it on Asterisk. It will be an expensive paper weight. In my opinion, you should not have to spend more than a minute or two - to configure a phone manually to connect to your PBX, hosted or in-house. Though I am not fond of Grandstream phones, I must say that in my tests the Grandstream video phones worked flawlessly and was provisioned in minutes. There was clear and consistent video over two sets of Grandstream video phones connected across continents. You also get to see your own video echo back to you in a regular echo() test. You truly get what you pay for. Cheers! Reza. On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:38 PM, Bruce N <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Everyone, > I know that this came up on the list before and I think Reza didn't really > like the phone due to firmware issues but it seems that it's making some > news these days. > http://nerdvittles.com/?p=703 > One thing that it impresses me is that it does OpenVPN. Wooo,,,,that is > 100% a bonus. But really what is the catch. IP Video phone under $100. Are > these knock offs from China? Did someone steal the blueprint for the frame > and copied the software? Are these cheap because they are one line support? > Can anyone weight in? > Thanks,Bruce
