Landline phones: why are they so far behind??!

Yep, it’s rant time again – open rant generator v1.0, enable tantrum networking bus, and start redundant shout and stamp processes!

To rewind for just a second – I was in the process the other day of buying some new phones for our house – probably DECT ones, and at least 2 handsets. You’d have thought it would be easy (I did originally), and the primary requirement was that the COLOUR matched the other CE (consumer electronics) in my living room – aesthetics matter after all!

It was only when I started browsing the pages of a popular home catalogue in the UK, that I realised that landline phone technology is about 10 years behind mobiles! What’s lacking? Well howabout this:

•    colour screens*
•    decent UI
•    decent batteries
•    separate base stations from handset charging bays*
•    (network) sync for outlook or similar – contacts!!

(* to be fair, a couple of offerings did have these – but the majority did not!)

Mobiles evolved between 5-10 years ago to have all this sort of stuff as standard, or as a result of the type of  product – yet the demand is just as strong for a landline. Especially annoying from my perspective is the phone vendors’ amusing notion that I might (a) type all the numbers I want to store in to the phone or (b) put my SIM in the handset so it could read the numbers off – whatever happened to USB cables, or wired/wireless networking?!

I appreciate that landlines might be a depressed breed right now, since many are using mobiles and internet phones, but, I would love to see the research that says they are dead – they aren’t – most homes in the UK have a landline of some form, particularly because ADSL broadband lines mandate a twisted copper pair in to the home – good enough (and charged for by BT) for a landline.

In fact the mobile handset vendors are missing a trick here. All they need to is re-purpose their UI, change the radio (in fact, scratch that, just take out the GSM/3G radio and leave the WiFi one in), whack in a base station, and you can serve the home landline phone market!

I find it beyond depressing that the technology behind landline phones is SO far behind where we are with mobiles – and don’t even get me started on baby monitors again, that’s going to be the subject of my next rant!

The bottom line here is that with some simple tweaks, a landline phone could be created  that is (a) as functional as a mobile within the house/garden, (b) part of a home converged network, and (c) bringing on the evolution of technology in this area on by about 10 years!!! Arggggh!