Ever since I began to implement GTD I’ve been on the lookout to simplify and slim down projects. For one, I eliminated a number of e-mail accounts and was left with Gmail, .Mac, vanity, and work. Next on my radar is telephone service.

There’s no reason to have a home phone, work phone, mobile phone, and softphone. It’s silly and embarrassing that technology can’t merge them together into something more manageable. I don’t give my mobile number to just anyone but that shouldn’t preclude me from taking business calls on it and maintain a separate voice mail account. But since I can’t, enter the myriad of other telephones and service platforms.

Ideally I consolidate to a single phone device using traditional cellular networks and VoIP (via SIP). Of course, the biggest players in the VoIP market (Vonage and Skype) have closed their SIP-based services to the outside world. Thus my Nokia E61 (with SIP capability) is rendered useless. There are other options like Truphone but Skype dominates and allows me an area code in my home State.

While I wait for the perfect marriage of mobile and SIP I’ve discovered dual-mode phones which offer POTS (plain old telephone system) and Skype services. That’s getting somewhere since most mobiles don’t have a Skype client (at least not one which works well). It appears some of these dual mode phones even support SIP for those players (like Gizmo) which don’t lock out their SIP network.

After much Googling I discovered Dualphone which appears to do POTS+Skype/SIP. Pricing isn’t too bad ($100-150) but what about SIP support? To find out I keyed http://www.dualphone.net into my browser and after a brief wait I got this lovely message:

All day today. Not once could I get through - just the mocking error page vomited by a Windows server. It’s not Windows I should be sore with, it’s the Dualphone people who (clearly) don’t monitor their web site. What’s the story? No webmaster? Five employees doing the job of fifty? Maybe there isn’t even a company - just a bunch of people spread around Earth connected virtually.

In any event…if you operate a business which uses the Internet as a means of communication, please monitor your site. If not, then take it down because a broken web site is worse than a non-existent one.

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• Nseries party in LA and who should buy the Nokia N95
• Covad’s inflexible DSL pricing
• Can Symbian devices really do it better than the iPhone?

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