The new Live Messenger capable phone from Philips is a great idea in concept. It’s a standard DECT wireless phone that makes normal land line calls but can also, via a PC, make calls to your Live Messenger buddies.
Having decided to go for the Philips VOIP433 I did only a small amount of ‘windows’ shopping online before deciding to buy through an Amazon reseller. Within 4 days of ordering I had my phone and set about setting it up.
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When placed next to a Nintendo DS Lite you can get an idea of the phone’s size. It’s larger than a standard candy bar mobile phone but is still small enough and very light.
The screen display could have been larger though and only displays three lines of text.
In the box you get an awful lot of kit. The phone, some spare rechargeable batteries, the base unit for the phone, a charger for the base unit, the DECT hub, a charger for the hub and two telephone line cables.
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The one major niggle I have about the phone (and something I did know before I purchased) was the dependency on a PC running Live Messenger.
My main PC is running the Windows Vista Beta and the phone simply does not work with the July ‘06 CTP release of Vista. Having dropped Philips a note about this they told me to keep and eye out on their website. Drivers could emerge, who knows?
So I plugged the USB cable of the hub into my Sony VAIO laptop. Immediately the hub was detected. You’ll see from the picture above that there are three cables coming out of the hub. One if for power, one is the USB and the other is to connect to a normal land line phone socket. It gets a bit cluttered and the hub pretty much needs to be near your PC unless you’ve got a USB extension cable.
One cool thing is that there’s no software. This really is plug and play. Plug the USB into your PC, have Live Messenger running and you’re away.
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There’s button on the top of the hub. When you press this it causes the phone (wherever it is) to start playing a Latino style polyphonic song! Makes finding the phone easy if it’s not in it’s recharging base unit. And that’s exactly what it’s for.
The quality of the signal when making standard phone calls is very good. And although my hub is sat on the floor at the moment I’ve not faced any problems so far.
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Making a call to one of your Live / MSN buddies is straightforward enough. There’s a button on the bottom of the phone that has the familiar Live Messenger icon on it. This is show on the picture just above my thumb.
Press this and the phone immediately (quite impressed there is hardly any delay) brings up your contact groups.
You then use the four way navigation pad to move through you contact groups.
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Contacts groups display on the phone’s screen and you simply click through to the group that you want.
If someone in your contact groups is online they have the familiar green online presence information next to them. Otherwise it’s red.
I need to do some more testing on the calling and get someone to call me too. I’ll put my experiences up in a further post. Stay tuned. 
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