Thanks to one of our great suppliers we've finally got our hands on the snom 820 and have had a chance to play with it for the last couple of weeks. The snom 820 has been out around the world for quite a while but unfortunately they seem to have been on a slow boat to New Zealand.

Even though we're late getting the phone itself New Zealand has been recognised a little and is now a tone selection in the setup, previously Australia was used as a close equivalent.

The 820 builds on the firmware from the 3x0 series, so has all the existing features such as the great web interface, the ability to control the phone via HTTP requests (this makes it super easy to implement a click to dial solution) and versatile function keys etc.

There doesn't appear to be info around about this so I'll just note here that my snom headset from a snom 360 works fine with the 820.

The big red message waiting light at the top right corner is bright and pretty un-missable compared to the small LED on the older models.

We use FreeSWITCH here at nicegear and like the previous snom phones, the 820 works without a hitch. Wideband audio, TLS+SRTP for secure calls, BLF and all other features work nicely out of the box.

Good things

It's definitely stylish. The colour display is a massive improvement over the snom 3x0 series - it's high resolution, bright and used well. There's a nice little alpha transparency overlay that comes up on incoming calls

The handset is a good weight, is comfortable in the hand and on the ear and is acoustically very nice. Combined with high definition wideband audio codecs such as G722 it has a beautiful rich sound. Another nice little touch is the lack of a physical hook switch, it's using some sort of sensor to detect whether the handset is on hook or not.

The base speaker has also been improved and also sounds great. I used to tell people that the Polycom acoustics were slightly ahead of the snom range but in my opinion the 820 has evened this out nicely.

Sitting on my desk next to the Apple aluminium keyboard it fits in pretty well :)

The bad bits

It has to be said; the price. Unfortunately at over $1000 dollars it's not really priced for the masses.

A minor nitpick; for some reason snom decided to swap the OK (tick) and Cancel (cross) buttons around from the snom 300 series. This is still taking a bit of getting used to.

Conclusion

If you can afford it, the snom 820 is a very very nice phone and one I would recommend without hesitation. I haven't found any issues at all so far, I'll be sure to add a comment if I come across any.

We've sold Linux netbooks in the past - Linux netbooks were what started the whole craze to begin with. Unfortunately it seems that they just aren't available from the official distributors in New Zealand any longer (as much as they were to begin with). It's now down to their aging overweight cousins, the Windows XP netbook.

Originally we had access to limited models of the Asus Eee and the Acer Aspire One with Linux, though both of those now seem to have disappeared from the suppliers catalogs. The MSI Wind and Dell Mini haven't been available with Linux pre-installed here in New Zealand at all, nor other brands that I'm aware of.

Unfortunately all we can do is apologise to our loyal customers and comment on the sad state of affairs that the distribution of technology is here.

The new Arduino Mega which uses the ATMEGA1280 micro-controller and has many more inputs and outputs than your average Arduino has been leaked.

You'll see a picture of it above showing the size, it sports the following features;

• 128KB of Flash
• 4KB RAM
• 4KB EEPROM
• 53 IO
• 4 HW UARTs
• 14 PWMs
• I2C bus
• 16 Analog Input pins

Sounds fantastic for those bigger projects.

nicegear will have stock of the Arduino Mega when it's publicly released and available for sale.

Unfortunately our suppliers have informed us that Technotrend is having trouble supplying their DVB cards at the moment. They are unsure whether or when this problem will be rectified.

This means that the Technotrend S-1401 DVB card, which has been extremely popular with MythTV users isn't available any longer.

We're currently trying to find a replacement card which has the same great Linux compatibility and low cost. I'll let you know what we come up with.

We get a large number of calls from people with questions such as "Why would I use VoIP?" or "What are the advantages of VoIP?" so I thought I'd make a short post answering some of these. I'll also cover another common one, "What is the quality of VoIP like?"

Firstly lets's talk about who can benefit from using VoIP technology. Pretty much everyone can in some capacity;

• If you have a home with teenagers who like to talk on the phone a lot you might like a second line (or third!) line to stop people hearing the busy tone when they call. It's better than call waiting as you'll actually know when someone calls and be able to talk to them there and then.
• If you're a SOHO (home office) or telecommute then you may benefit from having all your business calls separate to your home calls. This solves that old problem of people calling in expecting a business and getting one of the family answering the call.
• If you're a small or medium business then you will be able to increase the amount of incoming/outgoing lines to your office at a very reasonable price. You'll also likely save a substantial amount on calls.
• If you're a business with multiple locations around the country (or world) then you will be able to save a substantial amount off not only your normal calls but calls between offices will likely be free of charge.
• A contracting business such as building with mobile workers will be able to save money on calls to it's mobile workforce.

Let's mention VoIP providers briefly. These are the guys that offer you a phone service to go with your VoIP phone, much like Telecom offer you a traditional phone service. A couple of years ago there weren't many VoIP providers in New Zealand to choose from and the quality may have been less than ideal. These days there are a bunch to choose from and the quality is superb.

For an example we will pick on 2Talk (we use 2Talk for our calling here at nicegear). 2Talk has a range of plans on their website, from a no-monthly-cost plan up to larger business plans. Their entry level monthly plan (2Talk 500) offers two lines, two incoming numbers in your area (pretty much all areas of the country are covered these days), 500 included minutes to anywhere in New Zealand and most countries around the world, 5c per minute after that and 25c per minute calling to New Zealand mobiles. Along with that all their plans support a huge number of features; Voice mail (with emailed messages), call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, call transfer, locate me (rings multiple phones simultaneously), call recording, etc. etc.

2Talk is just one provider that you can choose from these days, I've discussed them here as we use them for our calls here and know their service a little.

This brings me to the quality issue; "What is the quality of VoIP like?". In a sentence, it's as good or better than your normal phone line. If one end of the call is a normal old style telephone connection then it's going to be the same quality as it always was. The reason I say it can be better is if you're calling a friend who is also on VoIP the connection could be digital all the way, in these cases the quality can actually be better than you're used to. If you'd like to test the quality feel free to give us a call (03 974 9011) and see for yourself.

For most people the cost savings and features that you get out of the box are the main interests of VoIP, although, there are many other advantages for advanced users too such as incoming numbers in multiple areas all coming to your phone, being able to answer your phone from anywhere there's an Internet connection etc.

Of course since we sell hardware I'll pop a couple of links here :) If you're interested in getting started with VoIP here's a couple of quick suggestions (I'll cover this more in depth in another post). The Linksys PAP2T analog telephone adapter allows you to connect up to a VoIP provider and plug your normal old phone in to make calls. The snom 300 or Linksys SPA922 will plug directly into your broadband router and allow you to make calls (they also have more advanced features like transfer buttons etc.).

Dealing with VoIP on a daily basis has the side effect of making me overlook some of the most obvious and useful features it offers so I'm sure I've missed something. If you think of something I've missed or have a question that isn't covered then by all means leave a comment below.

All the best - hads