So, I was recently in Best Buy, and noticed a Panasonic “phone system” “that could interact with your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to receive and initiate calls over your cell line transparently”:http://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/vModelDetail?storeId=15001&catalogId=13401&itemId=100551&catGroupId=34154&modelNo=KX-TH111S&surfModel=KX-TH111S&cacheProgram=11002&cachePartner=7000000000000005702 when it was in range of the base station.
I was deeply enamored of this idea…but they don’t admit that they work with the Bluetooth implementation in Treos, and they seem to promise dire consequences if you try to use an unapproved phone. Uniden has “a similar system”:http://uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=ELBT595, and it seems much more liberal, though, so all is not lost.
Except…well, then I started looking at prices. $180 for the base unit. More than $100 per handset, and we’ve got phones stashed all over the house.
Yeah, that’s what I thought, too, no goddamn way.
And then the new Linux Journal arrived, and it’s devoted to “Asterisk”:http://www.asterisk.org/. Now I dutifully bought “the O’Reilly book on Asterisk”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/asterisk/index.html when it came out a year and a half ago, and I read through some of it, but honestly, I haven’t had the time or, really, the impetus to pursue it.
But it occurred to me a few minutes ago, “Hmmm, I wonder if Asterisk can link up with cell phones, etc., etc.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, “it can”:http://www.thetechguide.com/howto/asterisk/chanbluetooth.html. I still don’t know if I’m going to have time enough any time soon to monkey with it–and it would require buying some hardware (though less than one of these proprietary things would cost, at least up-front)–but it is interesting that it is at least a possibility.
And, you know, there’s _source code_.
