By Andrew Liszewski
It’s kind of hard to get excited about a landline phone these days, particularly when most of us are considering ditching them in favor of VOIP or strictly using a cellphone. But the OpenFrame platform designed by OpenPeak has enough eye candy to catch my attention. While many cellphone manufacturers are rushing to create handsets that emulate Apple’s iPhone OS, OpenPeak seems to be the only one trying to do the same thing for the home phone. The hardware, which consists of the ‘OpenFrame’ itself (the small tablet that looks like a digital picture frame) and a more traditional phone handset, will be manufactured by OpenPeak but made available to consumers through the telcoms with a price tag of about $200 to $300.
And like with the iPhone, the company will be encouraging developers to create third-party programs to complement the OpenFrame’s core set of applications like a calendar, local weather & news and even internet radio. While there’s no question the UI the company has demo’d looks slick, even I find it hard to justify such a device when I already get the same online services from the PC or laptop I sit behind all day. Not to mention the fact that I mostly only use my home phone for the uber-important task of buzzing the pizza delivery guy in.
[ OpenPeak OpenFrame Platform ] VIA [ Wired Gadget Lab ]
