Traditional phone, no thanks…

With a baby on the way we are looking at all the ways possible to cut back on expenses and save as much as possible. Well one of the things that sucks money from us each month is our phone. We have a traditional telephone from a company that begins with a V and ends with an empty wallet on your horizon. I looked at our bill the other day and wonder why we are paying so much for so little. Then I made some changes to the service and ended up losing a bunch of things because of their package deals. so I called the customer service and just as I was getting somewhere I was cut off. Well, no sense in calling right back I would have had to start all over. No thanks.

Allison’s parent’s are in Florida. That makes it rather difficult because we have a baby on the way. I set them up with a web cam and we have one as well. But let me tell you, it is not always smooth. Nope, we almost always have to have a 30 minute conversation on the phone before we can video conference. Who needs the aggravation. I can’t imagine having to deal with that once a baby arrives. Can you imagine a crying baby and technical difficulties, I can and it isn’t pretty.

So I’ve been looking into the possibility of VoIP and found a company that makes VoIP possible with video phones. A dedicated video phone may just be the thing that we need to keep the future grandparents and our soon to be born child in touch with each other. Here is the phone that I think we should use.
There is another phone but the one below is more in line with our lifestyle, we are mobile and portable. Can’t be tied to one location, maybe we want to make the call from the baby’s room, maybe we want to do it from the living room, with the Packet8 Tango we have the freedom of movement.

Packet 8 Tango

Using a simple plug-and-play videophone we could get crisp and colorful images from a rotating high-quality CCD camera. That means that grandma and grandpa would be able to see every expression on the little one’s face. And the little on would be able to recognize grandma and grandpa’s faces and voices. And with the Packet8 Videophone there is no learning curve. This is important because that means no more conversations to set up a conversation. The up to 30 frames per second video quality means smooth full-motion video. And one of our biggest complaints with the web cams is the echo. that drives us all crazy, but that would not be a problem with echo-cancellation and no-delay high-quality audio from the Packet8.

12 thoughts on “Traditional phone, no thanks…”

  1. Yeah they are about the only choice around for me at the moment and I’d rather just live with cell phones and dump the home phones all together but I have some resistance to that idea.

  2. I have been considering getting a VOIP phone aswell. I currenlty only use a cell phone but am very interested in this technology. I will have to check out this video phone it looks pretty sweet.

  3. Yep, we did the same thing. We were paying $35.00 a month for our phone service, plus another $39.99 a month for my cell. It took three calls to three different people before I got someone to admit that I could pay just $10.00 a month to keep a phone plugged in and working. In case someone is here babysitting without a cell or there’s a signal interruption or something.

  4. Hi Mike,
    VoIP is pretty prevalent now and is only getting better, video phone can be very useful especially for my family and our situation.

  5. We dumped the landline phone years ago and all have cell phones, instead. For the wife and I, our basic cell phone plan is less than $70 per month (total for two people and more minutes than we need).

    Her parents live in Sweden, so we do the video conference thing every weekend. We just each have MSN Messenger and a webcam and it hooks up in seconds. No problems. No fuss. No delays. Easy video conferencing everytime.

  6. Well, until I can convince my wife that we don’t need a landline I’m not going to win that fight.

    We use Windows Live Messenger for the video conference but get an echo for some reason. Probably some adjustments I have to make.

  7. That is a nice present for someone close to the family. At the moment a little bit to expensive as a giveaway present. I like the big frames with mp3 sound on the wall.

  8. That would be a great present for a family member. I do like the idea of the photo frames. I just uploaded all my photo-A-Day Stuff to my iPod and Zune, I could do that to photo frames as well.

  9. We had echo problems, too. One thing that may be a problem is having the webcam / microphone too close to the speakers (on either end). My father-in-law used to have his microphone near his speakers so when we would talk it would come out his speakers, get picked up by his microphone, and come back out our speakers! Echo…..!! And then get picked up by our microphone if it was too close and on and on!

    That may not be your problem, or you may have already thought of that, but just thought I’d share.

Comments are closed.