This is the fourth in a series of posts on random observations about CES. The first was about screens. The second was about fashion. The third was about sustainability.

Phones

There were a number of interesting phone trends at CES, despite being overshadowed by Apple’s announcement of it’s new iPhone, which is a great example of hardware convergence. Steve Jobs introduced it as three devices: a music device, a phone, and an internet device. That’s a nice way of summing up the convergence we’re seeing in devices such as Samsung’s Blackjack, Sharp’s Sidekick III, Blackberry’s Pearl, Palm’s Treo, LG’s Chocolate, Motorola Q, …you get the picture. I’m not going to dive into this aspect of phones as there’s plenty of commentary about them at Engadget, Gizmodo, and C/Net.

VOIP was a big trend. This year, there were a number Skype compatible products, like this speaker phone designed specifically for Skype:

There were cordless/Skype dual mode phones, like the Netgear SPHD200D:

I had an illuminating conversation with one of the Vonage employees at their booth. We talked about the Vonage VPhone, a USB device that’s a phone. With it, you can call anywhere there’s a PC.

As we spoke, he pointed to the orange traditional phone below and said:

“We’re getting rid of our phones and are only using Vphones.” Veeeerrrryyy interesting. Vonage will no longer have phones, they’ll have USB sticks they issue each employee along with their computers. Very “on-brand” for a VOIP company.

Not to be outdone by announcements of cool technology, Vonage had their new router with picture caller ID displayed under glass:

Bummer it’s not a video phone, like the ones displayed by OJO, who were in the booth next to Vonage and uses a similar shade of orange for their branding. The router was designed by frog design.

I found an interesting little example of optimism in the Sony Mylo:

It’s a wifi-enabled communications device. The screens slides up to expose a keyboard. Mylo stands for “My Life Online”. What’s interesting about it is that has a couple of IM programs, Skype, the Opera web browser, an audio/video player, Photo viewer, and text editor. But what it’s not is a cell phone. If it can find a wi-fi connection to log into (apparently one that doesn’t have a sign-in page), then it’s online. The reason I find this optimistic is because it assumes the ubiquity of wi-fi, which may or may not be a valid assumption. For $350, the buyer needs to know they have wi-fi available most of the time. Who does? How about college students? Or maybe people who live in cities that will soon have municipal wi-fi, like Philadelphia. I find Sony optimistic because this seems more like a device geared towards the future than a practical one today for many people. Now, if it sold for under $100, that would be a different story…

This colorful phone is from the Spanish company Imaginarium, who was looking for a distributor in the US.

It’s aimed children, six years and older. It has buttons to call mom and dad as well as a few slots for a few other numbers. It’s meant to be given to the child on a case by case basis, not something that they keep all the time like a regular cell phone. This wold compete with phones from companies like Whereify.

Trend: Device Mashups. Phones at CES prove that manufacturers will create hand held devices that do many different things. It’s almost as if we’re in the Cambrian period of telephony. The Cambrian was the time before the dinosaurs which saw an explosion of different life forms, many of which died off. Likewise, we’re in a period of frenzied innovation in telephony, with no clear winner in terms of functionality.