A new year traditionally comes with New Year’s Resolutions and looking at our last post, one of our resolutions must include blogging more often.  It is true that when business is going fast, blogging gets lower on the priority list.  But a 6 month hiatus is not acceptable, so here we are again with all the best wishes for 2009 and an introduction of Cisco’s newborn, the Cisco SPA-525G.

Despite its appearance and model name, this is not a Linksys phone but a Cisco one.  Although not obvious on the outside, the fact that it runs both SIP and Cisco’s own Skinny protocol is a giveaway.  But this baby has more up its sleeve than meets the eye.  Like many other IP phones, the SPA525G comes with two Ethernet ports with a built-in switch and Power over Ethernet support.  However, unlike any other IP phone it also comes with a 802.11G WiFi connection supporting WEP and WPA, making this a very versatile phone in any situation.

And the wireless fun doesn’t stop there either.  The new IP phone also comes with a built-in Bluetooth connection, allowing you to pair the phone easily with Bluetooth headsets.  If that’s not enough, a USB connection allows you to add a mass-storage device to the phone and play music from it through it’s built-in MP3 player.

One of the biggest drawbacks of Linksys-series SPA IP phones is that they (until recently) did not offer any kind of shared address book if you’re not connecting the phone to a SPA9000 IP PBX.  Both the new Cisco IP phones and the earlier Linksys IP phones (through a firmware upgrade) now support LDAP corporate address books.

The phone is available for preordering in the US at around $400, but hasn’t showed up at dealers in Europe yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 15:23 CET and is filed under Hardware, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.