I want my hybrid phone

If you're like me you have several remote phones in your house, at least one hard-wired, plus a cell phone. One for me, one for the wife and perhaps one for the teen. Then you have another line at your office, which these days may be a voice over IP phone. Why should I need all these hand sets to access different telphony services? I shouldn't.  

For a long time I was content to think that the issue of embedding multiple radios into a single, compact device just wasn't feasbile. This point was brought home recently when I watched the '80s cop buddy movie Lethal Weapon. In one scene, Danny Glover grabs what looks like a shoebox, slams it on top of his car and lifts a corded hand set to make a cellular call. Could that problem finally be overcome with the advent of new GSM/VOIP hand sets supposedly coming from Nokia and others? I guess we won't know about size issues until the units are out. But the first wobbly steps towards convergence are already being taken with BT's Bluephone and BT Fusion, a converged phone service that mixes cellular GSM with Bluetooth connectivity to your land line when you're in the office or at home.  The service uses the most cost-efficient network available. So if you're at home you connect locally and don't use up cellular airtime minutes.

I'm not a big fan on Bluetooth, which is very slow and has limited distance. A head set we have in the office is excellent at my desk but quickly breaks up by the time you are 30-40 feet away. And if you go through a door, forget it. This technology may succeed in Europe, where BT plans to roll it out, but will never replace remote or corded phones in US homes and businesses. But wait - the base unit also supports WiFi, in anticipation of the next generation of converged GSM/VOIP phones.

Eventually, converged hand sets will be the norm, as will converged services that support them. And these services will cross billing boundaries as well. That's where things get messy. For example, your Verizon or Cingular cell phone might support WiFi access to your land line at home, cellular on the road, and VOIP in the office. In each of the three domains a decision will need to be made as to whether billing goes to your home or business account. Calls will ring into the phone from all three sources, possibly rerouted from different call-in numbers (home phone, cell phone, work phone). But within each domain the trick will be allowing personal calls to be correctly separated from business, regardless of location. The home domain will be mostly personal, the work domain mostly work, but the cellular domain could be either. So users will need to be able to indicate call types when dialing out. That integration is probably still quite a ways out.

But for right now, I'd just settle for one hand set for all of my personal needs.