Dear Lazyweb: If you have had good (or bad) experiences with USB speakerphones, I’d love to hear about it.
My gut instinct would be to spend the $129 for the Polycom Communicator, since Polycom has a pretty good reputation for quality speakerphones. But I’d love to know if there are decent quality alternatives.
Jon Stahl's Journal
Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
we recently purchased a USB to RJ11 adapter – the dlink DPH-50U so that we could plug our existing polycom analog speakerphone into a computer for use via skype.
In our experience, it worked pretty well – the speakerphone had all the usual limitations of a speakerphone, and adding skype to mix was fine as long as the folks on the other end had a proper setup – headset, absence of excessive background noise, etc.
At $50 it makes a nice alternative to the more expensive polycomm which we also looked at.
Arif-
This is insanely helpful — thank you!
Here is a recent review of the product in question:
http://voipspeak.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=116&Itemid=27
Hope that helps! BTW we use an original Polycom SoundStation that we got on eBay hooked up to our VoIP PBX via Sipura ATA and have had great results.