Yes, some people still get landlines installed in new houses, but they may not be happy about it

By adamg on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 10:28am

Local venture capitalist Bijan Sabet reports he and his family are very happy with the technology they chose for their new custom-built home, except for the sad state of residential phone offerings - from both Verizon and competing home-PBX systems, all of which seem stuck in the 1980s:

The state of residential phone systems is a joke. reminds me of how mobile phones used to look before the iphone/android. adding names to the address book is torture. i gave up after adding my parents and my brother. ...

I'd love to see someone do for home phones what Nest did for thermostats. Build a beautiful android based landline phone system with a set of rich cloud apps along with Google's marketplace.

Topics:

Home 'n' hearth

Technology

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Comments

um

By anon on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 11:36am.

The words "beautiful" and "Android" don't go together. "Useful" yes but aesthetics, no. Maybe Apple or Microsoft instead.

I'm surprised a big tech nerd

By Jeff F notloggedin on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 1:39pm.

I'm surprised a big tech nerd like this guy wouldn't have considered products/services from companies like Ooma et al, that offer pretty much exactly what he's asking for. Sleak modern design (ie no "plastic buttons"), very intuitive interface, web accessable apps, works with pretty much any POTS or wifi phone you like.

Not only is Android ugly...

By anon on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 1:47pm.

Bringing Google deeper into our homes for the convenience of easily adding phone book entries is a great idea.

Who needs warrant-less wiretapping with Google's dubious privacy policy selling you to anyone who can pass a captcha?

I hope for all of us, whoever makes landlines stop sucking is actually selling a product not in the market of selling identities like Google is.

Too many assumptions

By dirtywater77 on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 5:28pm.

If a company wanted to build a landline telephone system on top of the Android OS and give it a pretty user interface, they could certainly do so. The reason Android apps don't look pretty is usually because the app developers are lazy or don't want to spend the time building a nice UI. It's an open-source operating system that any company can modify; there's no rule that says your UI has to look just like the default Android UI.

Also, there's no fundamental reason an Android-based phone system would need to connect to Google's servers. Obviously if you cut the system off from Google then there would be no access to the Google Marketplace, Gmail, Google Maps, and other Google services. But if the design goal is to allow people to use the system without Google looking over their shoulder, then that is feasible.

Verizon's Centrex has always

By hrose on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 2:00pm.

Verizon's Centrex has always sucked. And many firms are ditching their PBX equipment in favour of VoIP solutions.