The snom 870, a desktop VoIP enabled phone, is the latest addition to the company's “8” series of fourth generation SIP phones for small and mid-sized business markets.

 

“This phone give a lot of flexibility and provides enterprise customers a lot of capabilities,” said Mike Storella (News - Alert), director of business development for snom, adding that the continued development of the iPhone had demonstrated the public’s appetite for touch screens. Storella also said that touch screen technology has advanced to the point where it has become a very practical business application.

 

In fact, the latest 8 series is bolstering its touch screen capability with high resolution color 4-by-3-inch display with 24-bit color depth. The touch is designed to handle complex applications like swapping calls or establishment of conference calls for up to five participants via a simple “drag and drop” menu, according to the company.

 

“The snom 870 marks the next step in communications design and technology for snom,” said Michael Knieling (News - Alert), snom’s executive vice president of Marketing. “It is not just a phone, but a highly intelligent endpoint that blends advanced technology with superior design at a compelling price point.

 

Knieling believes the additional features ­– including telephony, unified communications and customer relationship management applications – are critical for today’s enterprise workforce.

 

These features include: IP telephony systems and solutions ( IP-PBX and hosted VoIP) platforms and integrated Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 via its special firmware - snom OCS edition – to CRM solutions.

 

Like the other phones in the 8 series, snom 870 incorporates klarVOICE for voice quality. The snom klarVOICE is a wideband handset that can be adapted to all snom VoIP telephones, while capturing more than twice the spectrum of voice frequencies than standard phones enabling phone conversations with greater clarity and richness, according to the company.

As TMCnet reported last year, the new snom klarVOICE handset works with the codec G.722. This codec is able to shrink the bit rate of the voice channel down to 12.65 kbps, offering quality.

 

The phone also integrates an XML browser to provide a wide range of additional applications from controlling an external monitoring camera or accessing business-critical information and data from the web, the snom 870 offers a wide array of extras.

 

The snom 870 is the second model of the new 800 series product line of advanced business VoIP phones from snom and complements its existing line of VoIP phones: the snom 820, snom MeetingPoint and snom 300 VoIP telephone series.

 

snom MeetingPoint, which also allows for 12 SIP extensions and native connectivity with Microsoft (News - Alert) OCS, is designed to record meetings with up to 10 participants with a USB port that allows users to transfer the recordings.

The 870 has two USB ports, one which is designed for Wi-Fi and the other is open to a myriad of uses to allow flexibility to devices.

 

It costs $349.