Android cordless home phones soon?

March 01, 2010

Protoype of Android cordless home phone ( source: Curventa )

Motorola and SGW Global are introducing Android powered Cordless phones in the market. Both the companies have showcased their upcoming Cordless phones at the CES 2010 in Jan. (See http://androidandme.com/2010/01/news/motorola-introduces-android-powered-home-phone/ and http://www.sgwglobal.com/ )

SGW Global's Phone:

SGW's phone is equipped with DECT CAT-iq 2.0 and WiFi, offers a large 3.2” touch screen and virtual keyboard. The Android Cordless phone promises to offer a rich set of telephony and advanced audio features including HD sound and multi-base/handset/line support. The phone will support a range of connected applications – from “always on” web browsing, email and widgets to internet radio and Picasa. Other solid features are social networking and IM, photo viewer, music player, YouTube, news and weather. Interestingly it also has interactive TV remote control, and is a certified DLNA device,which means the Android Cordless can connect to other DLNA devices and act as a controller to stream media. The handset can be personalised to suit individual tastes and needs, and is quite stylish.

Motorola's Phone:

Motorola's phone (HS1001) does not appear to be as feature rich, and does not really look that great, but they seem to be aiming to provide a basic touchscreen cordless + WiFi experience without going for the 'full multimedia experience' that the SGW claims its phone will provide. Basically Motorola's offering seems to be more like a 'Cordless phone upgraded to Android OS', whereas SGW seems to be 'smartphone but works as cordless'. Going forward though, Motorola will surely upgrade its specifications with newer models to come. Both the phones seem to be in the prototyping stage, and will come out by May -June 2010. Motorola HS1001 will be available for around $150 whereas price of the SGW phone is yet unknown, but expected to be significantly higher.

Comparision of Both phones:

Detailed Specifications of the SGW phone are avaiable on their site, and also their designers Curventa. (See http://www.curventa.com/what/android-cordless). Motorola's basics specs are known, but we don't know yet much about the details.

Both phones use an ARM9 cortex running at 240MHz from DSPG. SGW has an addition Teaklite DSP for audio processing running at 160Mhz. SGW's screen is bigger(3.2" vs 2.8"). Both have 128 MB RAM and 256 MB ROM. Both have WiFi, MicroSD expansion slots, Android 1.6 (Donut). Additionally SGw's offering is CAT-iq 2.0 compliant, can behave as a DLNA Digital Media player/controller, has infrared remote control and muli base.line support . Being android based, most of the other software features are expected to be similar (IM, browser, RSS, email etc).

Cordless (DECT) + Wifi + Android + touch screen +browser + Remote TV Control + DLNA + Music player + multi base/line support + possibly every other app in the android app market. Is this the beginning of a new resurgence in the cordless phone market, towards providing an all in one "super phone" with seamless connectivity to various home systems (plus maybe GSM and CDMA too later) and offering software functionality comparable to smartphones?