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Developer: VTech
Price: $99.95
Availability: Out now
Pros: Great phone, great instant message/instant voice tool
Cons: Spare a USB port buddy?
Overall: Decent phone, does all it says with aplomb.  If you’ve got a lot of IM’ers or just want to have IM without booting up, check out this combo.

Like a product stolen right out of Spaceship Earth at Disney’s Epcot, VTech advances the lowly house phone into something from our ancesters wouldn’t have even guessed.  Our Arnold Zafra picked up this phones release a while back and expected good things from it.  After reviewing it, he was spot on.  V-tech has done a pretty good job at merging the texting fun of your cell phone into your home phone format.

The phone itself is nice, the form factor is pretty similar to a Palm.  The qwerty keypad is nicely laid out and is quite usable.  I had no issue tapping away messages or answering the phone.  What I really enjoyed about the VTech is the ringer choices.  Not only do they stock some nice ones, like you’d expect on a cell phone, but they offer the ability to download new ones.  Really nice for those of us with short attention spans.

The phone comes with software you’ll need to install on your home PC.  Once installed and running, it drops a tray icon in and your phone can now IM at will.  Connecting through the phone was as easy as hitting the Messenger button.  It can connect with MSN Messenger, Windows Live and AOL.  You can have multiple text conversations going at once, which is handy.  It also has voice chat for VOIP applications.  I didn’t get to try that.

One minor annoyance was the need for the unit to plug into an open USB slot and the phone line.  For many of us, these two things are not far apart but it would have been so nice to have this hook into WiFi.  Just saying, I am running out of USB slots and I seem to be too lazy to get a hub.  To it’s credit, the cordless phone didn’t interfere with any of the crazy things of got going on; its interference-free DECT 6.0.

In fairness, the phone and recharger can be almost anywhere in your house; it doesn’t need to be by the home base.

All in all, a great phone that can be much more, especially for your teens who hog up your computer time.  Now you can let them IM without monopolizing your computer.  Sweet.

Company site: [VTech]