My other phone(s) shame...

In addition to the iPhone, the E61 and my ‘pub phone’ (a little-used Skypephone) there’s another couple of phones in my life and I’m coming to resent them more and more. It’s my home phones.

They’re rubbish.

I didn’t want to buy a new landline handset. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t do landlines at all – they feel pointless. Personal communication shouldn’t be tied to a location – I don’t want someone to have to think about where I am before they call me. But there’s a couple of services we can’t have without it (the entry phone to our apartment block, for example, calls our wired phone when someone presses our buzzer) and it still feels rude to ask overseas friends to pay higher rates to call our mobiles (not everyone has discovered the joy of VOIP) . So I can’t yet reach this state of nirvana and having resigned myself to this, I paid £70 for a pair of Panasonic DECT handsets with a simple answer machine and received them this week.

Being the nerd I am I did, of course, start to read a load of reviews before I bought them, but I grew bored of the limited feature-set and ended up just buying something that looked passable and featured somewhere near the top of Amazon’s sales ranking. It’s not that the budget was terribly tight… it’s not unlimited by any means but I would have spent more for something exciting. It’s just there really doesn’t seem to be much out there. Particular complaints are:

• Ni-MH batteries (I didn’t realise they even still existed).
• No contacts synchronisation (and no, similar models with a ‘copy from SIM’ feature don’t count… who keeps their numbers of the SIM any more?)
• Three (yes three!) wallpapers (one usable) without any option to disable it on a ‘glorious’ 1.5″ screen.
• A UI that makes my first ever mobile’s interface (the Ericsson GH868, since you ask) look like that whizzy glass / touch thing Tom Cruise had in Minority Report.

OK, so we’re a couple of hundred words in and I’m still not really to the point. Sorry about that.

What I’m driving at is not just that I want more a more capable handset, but that the existence of such a big gap is ludicrous – my Skypephone has a feature set that’s far superior, can be extended further, attaches to my computer for syncing and cost about the same – but that there’s no need for a difference.

I’m ready for my femtocell now please that makes my mobiles usable at home. And none of this dodgy BT Fusion rubbish either – something that works with all our phones, no lock in. Perhaps even with the girlfriend’s non-smartphone.

Or a GrandCentral-eque service that allows geographic and mobile numbers to be added, calls to roam and hunt whilst still retaining the better pricing that’s typically available for consumer landlines.

Sure, I might be able to cobble something together with existing services or ‘roll my own’ with an Asterisk box at home or similar, but this has to be reliable and normob-friendly. At least I’d like proper spec handsets with bluetooth and contacts syncing… that’s not too much to ask. Is it?

Why can’t all my phones be like my mobiles?