Soft sip phone vs hard sip phone

[suheng]

Hi All,

Anyone can help on it, I want to purchase a IP phone from cisco. However, after awhile I ask myself why I need a hardware phone.
What is the benefits? I can not get the answer, maybe the only answer let me comfort is the sip phone no need so much power and no need boot can use by picked up immediately. I tried a hard sip phone of D-LINK of our company the quality is no different of the voice quality with my soft client like ekiga or sipdroid.

Anyone have good points on the benefits? Thanks.

Best Regards,
suheng

 

[john-b691]

Depends how you are going to use the PC as a phone. Few people can use the built in mic and speakers either due to disturbing others or because the mic picks up much more than it should. So you end up buying a headset , many of the bluetooth headsets cost as much as low end VoIP phones. So there is not a big cost savings.

The main reason you want a hard phone is you must be very careful what you are running on your PC when you are using a soft phone. It always seems to happen that the browser eats the CPU or a random virus file scan happens when you are on a important phone call. Although you can tune the machine to favor the soft phone client it only goes so far.

Mostly I don't trust the PC to be 100% stable.

 

[suheng]

Hi John,

Thank you so much.
Yeah, I also don't believe PC 100% stable like hard phone although I am a developer myself.

Seems only this will cause issue. As my experience I tried ekiga, twinkle in linux, quite not stable. For windows haven't try should be better.

As the key factor won't be impact latency and voice quality. It's the same.

For personal use , thinking no need to purchase a hard phone any more. Of course for business using purpose get a hard phone is better like you said some important call need to be stable when online.

I will use soft phone ^_^ to saving costs. Thank you again.

Best Regards,
Su Heng

 

[suheng]

Best answer selected by suheng.

 

[jsmithepa]

How about a semi-soft phone? Folks here in the States swear by their Smart Jack service, they basically use their tablet/cellphone to make calls except it goes through WIFI ==> Internet.

Another service in the U.S. named Republic I believe sells you cellphones that automatically switches to WIFI whenever possible, seamlessly, to conserve cellular charge, and amazingly it works.