OT: Bluetooth landlines

[Jethro]

just wondering if there were any landline phones which have bluetooth (with voice dial) to allow handsfree operation.

Question came up, as the Mrs (who has MS) has been advised to have an "alert pendant". I figured the same functionality could be provided with far fewer snouts in the trough by just carrying a mobile ..

"It's too heavy"

To which I suggested just wearing a BT earpiece. Which set me thinking that rather than using the mobile, why not a landline.

In fact am I alone in thinking a BT enabled base station could be quite useful, especially for people who run home servers, and would like to connect them to the landline without a modem ?

[Andrew May]

I have a Siemens Gigaset SL565 which I am very happy with although I only really use the bluetooth to sync with my Outlook address book.

[Lobster]

I have a Gigaset too, but AFAIK you can't use the bluetooth facility for voice dialing can you? [Could be wrong... ;) ]

[Arfa Daily]

Funnily enough, me an the missus were talking about this the other day. She spends endless hours on the phone to our daughters, and commented that it became tedious holding the phone to her ear for all that time. It then occurred to me how useful it would be to be able to just use a standard BT headset with a normal cordless phone. Considering that the technology is now just modular 'lego bricks' and so cheap that just about everything is now equipped with it for short range comms, it seems strange that the world of cordless DECT phones has not caught onto how useful a feature it would be to have on their products ...

Arfa

[Chris J Dixon]

A number of DECT phones do have provision to plug in a headset, indeed that was a key requirement when I chose it. However, after a year or two the contact has become intermittent.

Chris

[Lobster]

Ah well - going back to the previously-mentioned Siemens Gigaset - I can confirm this does have that feature. Not that I've ever used it; I just press the 'speaker' button when I want hands-free mode.

David

[Skipweasel]

Soldering iron is your friend.

Trouble with almost any PCB mounted interface to the real world is that it's subject to more stress than a soldered joint can survive for long.

[Andrew May]

I don't think it does. You can use a bluetooth headset - I've tried it once or twice, just because I could. But as I said, I bought it for the address book management.

Andrew

[Mike Barnes]

Arfa Daily :

Our DECT phones do have earphone sockets (that's one of the reasons we selected the model we did) but they've been superseded by these...

which are incomparably better. The DECT phone is built *into* the headset, so there are no wires anywhere. SWMBO can spend hours on the phone to her friends and family while cooking, doing the laundry, gardening, etc. Sometime I swear she forgets it's there.

[1501]

Links don't work

[John Rumm]

Especially when its lead free alas...

[Man at B&Q]

It's simply faulty product design if the mechanical stresses of insertion/removal of a connector are being placed on the solder joints.

MBQ

[Arfa Daily]

Dear oh lord, though ... What a PRICE they are ... :-\

Arfa

[Mike Barnes]

I posted URLs, which work fine in my browser. Either there was a temporary outage or there's a fault in the software that converted my URLs into the links that you used.

If you're still having problems try Googling "Plantronics C351N".

[Andy Champ]

The snipurl one works for me (Thunderbird / firefox). The other has wrapped and I wouldn't expect it to.

Andy