Time for PoE Powered Tablet

I am a little surprised about not seeing more main stream US retail outlets pushing Android based tablets, although those devices are flooding online shops such as Amazon and eBay. My un-researched guess is that the Chinese manufacturers somehow managed to miss the holiday shopping season in this country in terms of negotiating with the buyers of the large retail chains.

This weekend's local news paper showed a couple of places selling these Androids, including Best Buy, K-Mart and Staples. I went to Best Buy and looked at a couple of them briefly. I liked what I saw. Best Buy showed one live Archos 7. The touch GUI seems a little less responsive than the iPod Touch. Otherwise, I can definitely see using it to read a book or watch a video.

Back to the point in the subject line of my post. I saw a few models on eBay with Ethernet in their specs. In my first ever blog post on Sina.com two years ago, I suggested that someone should come up with a PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) powered notebook or netbook PC. Some of the netbooks were getting close to the 30W an IEEE 802.3at port could supply back then. Today's crop of Android tablets can definitely be powered and probably charged at the same time by a PoE port.

So, here is my free creative idea to the tablet makers: Create one that takes AC power from a PoE switch port. I think a lot of the doctors in my hospital will like it.

Turning an iPod Touch into a Wi-Fi Phone, for Free!

This is the first time that I have ever seriously touched an Apple product -- I have to admit, the iPod Touch is very slick. The wife wanted to get one to entice the kids to some cool learning materials online. So she got up early in the morning on the Black Friday and bought one.

I am more interested in turning it into something that it is not, namely, a phone. The iPod Touch G4 has all the capabilities of a smart phone minus the 3G cellular wireless circuitry. So I don't see why it should not be used as a phone.

It took me a bit of research but I did it! With all the free ingredients that you can find in Apple's App Store and free services from various voice over IP and SIP service providers. And here is the list of stuff and steps that I went through.

1. The Stuff

• Google Voice: Google Voice is a greate product which I have been using since its GrantCentral days. It has a long list of nice features. The most importing ones for this project are the phone number it provides and its capability to dial out to a regular phone.
• Talkatone: Unfortunately, the official Google Voice app in the Apple App Store supports the iPhone only, not the iPod Touch, which I suspect is intentional and I blame Apple for that. That is where Talkatone comes in: This little free app allows one to use Google Voice to dial out.
• Nimbuzz: Dialing out is, of course, just one part of a phone's function. The other part is to receive calls. Nimbuzz is a SIP client app that allows one to do that, and more.
• SIP Service: These days one can find many SIP service providers. I have used Gizmo5, SIPphone (on Ubuntu) and SIPgate. I assume that many if not all would work for this project, I have only succeeded in using Gizmo5.

2. The Dance Steps

Of course, I assume that you have registered your iPod Touch through Apple's iTunes, which by the way, I found to be a not-so-hassle-free process. At this point, you should be able to purchase apps from the App Store -- By the way, I recommend the Google App although it is not needed for this project. So go ahead and get Talkatone and Nimbuzz.

First, you have to have a Google account and a Google Voice account. They are all free and you can register one with any existing email address. The official Google Blog states that you may actually use an OpenID to log into your Google account if your favorite email provider supports that, such as Yahoo!. You need to have a phone to get a Google Voice account as Google requires you to enter a verification code to start that Google Voice account.

Second, you need to have a VoIP service for receiving calls. If you have an existing Gizmo5 account, that would be fine. If not, SIPgate seems to be a nice alternative. It is easy to find other SIP service providers just by Google search. The only thing you need is a phone number that you can register in your Google Voice account for it to forward incoming calls to.

Third, configure Nimbuzz with your SIP service.

Forth, you need to register your SIP phone number in Google Voice and configure it to forward calls to that number -- In my case, I used Gizmo5 as shown in the screen shot above.

At this point, your iPod Touch should be able to receive calls to your Google Voice number. It should be made clear here that Google Voice routes the caller's phone call to your SIP number, which means that if the caller has to pay for long distance call, there may be a charge involved even though they may be local to your Google Voice number.

Finally, install and configure Talkatone with your Google account. Talkatone seems to be easy enough. Upon start, it shows your Google account contacts. The only thing that took me a while to figure out is getting the dial-pad out to make a call: You double-tap the title bar to pop up the Google Voice menu, the click the Google Voice VoIP call item, a phone dial-pad shows up.

At that, your iPod Touch is converted into a Wi-Fi mobile phone which is able to make and receive calls using your Google Voice number.

It took me a little while to figure out how to make a call in Talkatone -- It seems to be OK if I want to call a person in my contact list as Talkatone shows the contact list. But what if I just wants to dial a phone number? Turns out, double tapping the title bar in Talkatone brings up the Google Voice menu. After that, it became intuitive.

It should be said that the the dial-pad in Talkatone and Nimbuzz are quite similar. So it may get confusing as which app should be used for dialing out. What I think could be done is to put the Nimbuzz icon to a different page.

Call quality is quite satisfactory as long as there is a reliable Wi-Fi signal. I tested it in the parking lot of Community High School while waiting in my car. Plugging in an earphone helps a little but is not an requirement. My entire project took two evenings of research and testing. Hope this post helps if others want to try.

[2011-03-11] -- Google has recently announced that the Gizmo5 service will be discontinued as of April 3, 2011. So the part about using Gizmo5 in this article has to be replaced using something else, such as SIPgate One. I have successfully configured that with sipdroid on an Android phone, so I don't think there is any reason for it not to work with Talkatone.

[2011-11-25] --  Follow this guide to make free SIP calls on an Android phone. Maybe I'll write another piece specifically about Android phones if I have a good way to capture some screen shots.