I had a chance to follow up with Avaya on their recent announcements of some new phone models, which I'd written a newsletter/blog post on earlier in the week.After I'd written that "Future of the Phone, Again" piece, I got to thinking some more about Avaya's definition of a "media phone" as a "cross between a telephone and a PC." At first glance, this made a certain amount of sense: You don't need a cross between a telephone and a PC everywhere, but for applications like time card entry and retail stations where PCs are unwieldy, it seems to fill a niche.
But then it occurred to me that we already have devices that are a cross between a telephone and a PC--they're called smartphones. So I put this question to Allan Mendelsohn of Avaya when we had our briefing later in the week.
Allan made a few points in response. First of all, he said the mobile device may not always be handy and needs re-charging, making it inherently less available than the phone/PC hybrid. Furthermore, he said landline phones still offer superior ergonomics compared with mobile phones, both in terms of voice quality and in terms of using the device for a computing application.
The advantage of the "media phone" over a softphone-enabled PC or laptop. Allan said, is that it's always on, and doesn't need to be re-booted. If you are doing a very discrete type of application, who wants to fire up a laptop or PC just to enter in a couple of quick data points? A touch screen phone can act like an ATM or any other device where you can quickly accomplish a couple of simple tasks.
On a separate note, we had the chance to visit at our office yesterday with Jeff Kane, who's President of NEC Unified. I'll blog in more detail about this interview soon, but Jeff told one anecdote that's relevant to this issue. He said that as an experiement, he removed his desk phone for a week and just used the softphone on his PC. Sure enough, the PC managed to crash a couple times a day that week.
The irony, Jeff said, was the reaction from the other person when those crashes happened in the middle of a phone conversation. He said he'd call back and explain that he was on a softphone and his PC crashed, and their response was, essentially, "Sure, whatever, no problem."
That rings true to me (so to speak). I think people's tolerance for communications technology hiccups has gone up significantly over the years.
