August 4, 2005
1 Landline + 1 Cellphone = 1 Handset
By David Pogue
NY Times
http://tech2.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/technology/circuits/04pogue.html?pagewanted=print
WHAT'S the best-selling piece of personal electronics on earth? What's more
popular than computers, camcorders, digital cameras or even iPods?
It's the cellphone. Cellphone sales dwarf everything else. According to the
Gartner research firm, 40 percent of the earth's population will be
carrying cellphones by 2009. Developing countries are skipping the landline
phase altogether, going from no phones to wireless ones.
In this country, we're stuck in transition. Most people have both kinds of
phones: wired and wireless. They maintain two phone numbers, have two
voice-mail setups and pay two bills, without ever fully appreciating how
redundant and silly that is. And here's the kicker: Most people use their
home phone lines, running up the home phone bills, during precisely the
hours when using the cellphone instead would be free (nights and weekends).
A few people have the courage and the signal strength to cancel their home
phone lines altogether. But last month, RCA unveiled a less radical
solution: the RCA Cell Docking System (under $130 at, for example, Best Buy
and Circuit City).
Once set up, this intriguing device looks like a standard household
cordless phone. It has a nice heft and shape, the handset doubles as a
speakerphone and room monitor, and it operates on the 2.4-gigahertz
frequency (yes, that's the one that sometimes crackles if you have a
wireless network).
BUT its two biggest buttons, right up at the top, are nothing you've ever
seen before on a phone: Home and Cell.
Dial a number and press Home, and you're making a phone call on your home
line. Dial and press Cell, and you're routing the call through your
cellphone, which sits elsewhere in the house (more on this in a moment).
Similarly, you can answer all incoming calls - home or cell -with this one
handset.
If you have one of the 60 compatible cellphone models, there are two
important benefits to this arrangement. First, you can milk your cellular
carrier's "free nights and weekends" clause for all it's worth. Every time
you make a call, just check your watch; if it's after 9 p.m. or a weekend,
hit the Cell button for your calls. (It would be nice if the handset's
screen showed you the current time, so you could skip the "check your
watch" part. Maybe the designers felt that that feature would be flaunting
this device's money-saving purpose a bit too publicly.)
The second benefit is that you now have two home phone lines. You can be
faxing on your landline and chatting over the cell line. Or your teenager
can be using one line while you're using the other. You can even conference
the two lines together.
How it all works isn't easy to understand, even after you've seen the
setup. There are two semicylindrical base stations. They are not, ahem,
likely to wind up in the Museum of Modern Art; the black-and-silver plastic
design looks dated and kitschy, like something futuristic as imagined by a
Disney designer in 1960.
One of these base stations holds and charges the cordless handset; it plugs
into a phone jack. The other base is topped by a cradle in clear acrylic,
like a Barbie chaise longue. The occupant, though, is supposed to be your
cellphone. You open it up (if it's a flip phone) and connect it to the
black, four-inch adapter cable that protrudes from the cradle. This base
both charges the cellphone and wirelessly connects it to the rest of the
system.
Because you won't actually be touching it (except when you want to leave
the house with your cellphone), you can put this cellphone base anywhere.
You can leave it up high, next to a window - anywhere that gives you the
best signal strength indoors.
It's nice to have the freedom to place a call on the cellphone whenever it
might save you money. And it's certainly convenient to answer calls made to
your cellphone on a nice, big, comfortable handset, anywhere in the house.
For $48 each, you can even expand the system by buying one or two more
cordless handset extensions. You can park them anywhere in the house that
has a power outlet; they don't require connections to a phone jack.
As a final convenience, the docking station keeps track of how many
minutes' worth of airtime you use while the cellphone is at home.
Still, there are a few causes for pause. The big one is compatibility. At
the moment, all 60 of the phones on the Docking System's compatibility list
come from Nokia, Motorola or Sony Ericsson. (The cellular carrier you use
doesn't matter.) A complete list appears at
communications.rca.com/en-US/SupportedPhones.html. At that Web page, you
can also sign up for e-mail notifications of newly compatible phones.
If your cellphone comes from Samsung, LG, Palm or any other maker, you're
out of luck - for now. RCA plans to add phone models and manufacturers in
the coming months, and has devised a clever system for upgrading existing
Cell Docking Systems. A U.S.B. connector on the back of the cell base
station lets you pump in software upgrades from a Windows PC. And if the
newly compatible phones have different connectors, RCA will offer new
versions of those four-inch black adapter cables for $15 each.
Clearly, the company has thought a lot about how a combo cellular-landline
phone should work. For example, the handset has buttons for standard
cellphone functions - voice mail, 50-number address book, ringer on/off
button - as well for standard multihandset cordless phones, like Intercom,
Speaker and Mute.
The execution of this great idea is not seamless, however. When the phone
rings, for example, two signs tell you which number the call is coming in
on: the ringer sound itself and little lights next to the Home and Cell
buttons. To answer, you must press the appropriate button - but why? If you
don't especially care which line is ringing, you should be able to pick up
the phone and say "Hello?" without pressing a button.
Second, the handset buttons are not illuminated (although the screen is).
Dialing in the dark is darned difficult.
Finally, although this is scarcely RCA's fault, the Docking Station offers
an embarrassingly direct demonstration of the difference in sound quality
between a cellphone (terrible) and a landline (excellent).
Now, the Cell Docking System isn't the first attempt to bridge the great
landline-cellphone disconnect. For example, a discontinued gadget called
the CellSocket let you route all incoming and outgoing cellular calls to
your home line. But it didn't tie those two lines together the way RCA's
system does, so you couldn't choose which to use on a call-by-call basis.
For $10 plus $3 a month, Cingular's FastForward cradle redirects calls made
to your cellphone to your home number. It happens "upstream" in the
network, so incoming calls don't use cellular minutes. But only incoming
calls are affected; all outgoing calls still use your home line, so you
don't get the two-line effect of the RCA. (These other gadgets work with a
similarly limited list of cellphone models. What's so special about Nokia,
Motorola and Sony Ericsson phones, anyway?)
The Docking Station won't appeal to everyone, even those whose phones are
on the compatible list. But RCA has evidently taken a page from the
playbook of iPod carrying-case makers: it's O.K. if only 0.0001 percent of
the market buys your product, as long as it's a very, very big market.
Forty percent of the earth's population? RCA says, "Bring it on."
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
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