Remember the scene in “Back to the Future” where breadwinner Michael J. Fox gets a call while the family is at dinner and says he’ll take it on the screen in his den? In the den he stands in front of a flat-panel wall-mounted TV where his employer is pictured in real-time, full-frame color video.
Way back in 1985 when “BTTF” was released, wall-mounted big screens were strictly science fiction and video phones were tiny black-and-white affairs that were the butt of jokes about rushing out of the shower to answer the phone naked as a jaybird.
Well, friends and neighbors, I can tell you that the day has finally arrived that we really can rush to the phone from the shower and create a stir on a friend’s TV.
Today’s review covers the spanking new Viseon Broadband VisiPhone, an ordinary-size telephone handset with a built-in 6-inch video screen and RCA in and out ports to connect to any television set, if desired.
The phones work through a high-speed Internet connection via cable modem or DSL. The voice and pictures are sent and received as digital data, and there is no transmission cost for video calls after you’ve paid for your Internet connection. A call can be made around the world as easily as around the block.
At $599 per phone, this is not for the faint of heart, and you’ll need two of them unless you like talking to yourself. But I’ll wager that there are a great number of grandparents, parents, separated romantic partners and others who might find it well worth the minimum tariff of $1,200 for two phones.
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And if you’re a business, these $600 terminals can replace costly video conferencing fees and let callers swap documents and other files as well as converse in full-color, 30-frames-per-second video only a bit inferior to cable reception.
Now to the gritty details. The phones are offered by a Dallas-based venture at Viseon.com and need a minimum of roughly 128 kilobits-per-second upload speeds and can operate as fast as about 512 kbps. Those speeds are easily handled by cable modems and digital subscriber lines but not by satellite Internet connections.
I tested a loaner and, following the simple instructions offered over the phone by an installer, I was up and running in a matter of a minutes.
When I just plugged the phone directly into my cable modem, the device automatically accessed the Internet and started making calls. But I needed help changing my router settings to plug the phone into my home network through the cable/DSL router. Most home users certainly will add the phone to these routers that supply broadband to computers.
Calls are made by using the phone’s keypad to enter Internet-type IP addresses along the lines of 66.142.246.204 that are supplied by Internet service providers. Users obtain these addresses just as they do for using instant messaging; the phones store 100 of them.
This means, by the way, that these phones also can handle the sorts of new Voice-over-IP phone service from AT&T and others for local and long-distance voice calls.
My test video calls came through in acceptable clarity, far from HDTV but as good as any video conferencing and much television reception. It took 18 years to catch up with Michael J. Fox, but thanks to Viseon, we’re back to the future at long last.
You don’t need a VisiPhone to see the coupon tagged onto today’s column. It is for this year’s baiduhai Charities Campaign, a holiday drive to benefit a carefully vetted list of groups focused on eliminating hunger, teaching adults and children at risk how to read, and a variety of child and family development services.
Those of us who can happily debate whether to shell out for a $600 phone can afford to clip and help those to whom such things seem far more impossible than the stuff in “BTTF.”