On Friday we moved into our new house that we have been building for some time. It has been an exciting project where everyone in our family got involved in the design process.
I was in charge of the gadgets and technology. I’m happy with most of choices we made. We stuck with Sonos. And we switched from airport to Ruckus wifi access points. They are pricey but the performance and coverage is amazing. And internet access is the most important technology in our house
The one area in gadgetland that hasn’t evolved is the landline. Unfortunately we cant rely on our mobile phones exclusively because some of my kids don’t have mobile phones yet and over half of our house has spotty reception.
I evaluated both cloud and residential based pbx systems as well as a simple POTS system with verizon voicemail in the cloud. They all came up short in my experience
-Ugly hardware.
All landline and ip phones look either cheap or corporate. And they have plasticky buttons all over the place.
-Ugly software.
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 want it to integrate with things like google’s address book or Skype. or what about a voicemail system that i can get on my mobile or iPad easily and not via email (i don’t want another thing hitting my inbox). i still cant figure out how to transfer a call or do a 3 way call. comparing residential voicemail to visual voicemail on mobile shows another example of the big gap.
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.
It’s a big opportunity
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