Use A Regular Phone For Cellphone Calls

nizo writes "Not too long ago I decided to get rid of my landline, however I miss being able to make a call with a regular phone, especially long calls that might drain my battery. It would also be nice if I didn't have to hunt for my cellphone at home when it rings. Well, it looks like there is a simple solution with a Cell Socket, a cradle for your cellphone that can be used to attach your cell line to one or more regular phones." Even better, for those with a landline or VoIP phone, would be a system that automatically picks the cheapest route out for any given call.

psh, rotary beats that anyday

[biryokumaru]

stolen from hack-a-day:

a rotary cellphone [sparkfun.com]

interesting

[blew_fantom]

with cell phone plans getting cheaper, this looks to be a viable alternative what with national call plans and competitive prices from all providers. the only thing of course, is that to have DSL, you need an actual phone number/line. unless everyone is going to run to cable, land lines are here to stay. that and many places don't even have cell towers anywhere near them so cell phones are useless in many areas anyway. in that respect, i don't see the land line market dying anytime soon.

Cheapest route is easy

[Tony Hoyle]

I have a set of lookup tables on my asterisk server which do this.

Of course the cheapest route is always analogue, so it's not a great advert for VOIP :)

Not sure I'd want my mobile phone to link to it though.. that's a separate number that only a few trusted people know.

TFA

[Teclis]

I hope their phone system is built better than their webserver.

I can't RTFA right now, so my only concern is the ability to adapt to different cell phone manufacturers, and what about newer cell phones after purchase. Otherwise, this actually doesn't sound like too difficult a project, but it's the idea that counts. This kind of device can easily be created with a few components and a PIC for under $10.

Important Note for users with dialup internet

[Veovis]

For those of you who live in an area without high speed internet access, devices like these will not allow you to use your cellphone to make calls to analog (traditional) internet service providers. (Same applys to mobile/flea market merchants with credit card terminals that dial into their processing center) 99.9% of cellphones are on a digital network (CDMA/TDMA/iDEN/GSM/GPRS/etc) and can not provide the channel clarity needed for analog signals

Re:interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not so sure about DSL requiring a phone number. I know it needs a phone line, but according to some Speakeasy promotional materials, one of the advantages of signing up for their DSL service is you can drop your landline service if you don't use it. Maybe this is new, but I'm not at all surprised.

wait for competition

[edstromp]

Cellsocket is a great idea. I looked into them extensively about 2 years ago. But they didn't make a version for my cellphone, and worse, they were quite slow to develop new adapters for new phones. This is a great market for such a device, but I honestly don't think it'll really take off until the cell manufacturing companies start making this a default must-have accessory with every new phone.

Nothing sucks more than being forced to buy an old, outdated phone, just so you can use the Cellsocket.

Stupid Trick

[scovetta]

I've been using this (stupid) trick to talk to my girlfriend (long distance): Party A: Forward your cell phone to Party B's Land-line, then call your own cell phone FROM your own land-line. Now you're both talking on normal-size phones, and you're using cellular minutes (good for night/weekends). Sure, you're double-paying slightly, but it's definately worth the not-brain-tumors [funnytimes.com].

I got one about a year ago. Here's my impression.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I got one of these about a year ago.

I recently built a vacation/retirement house in a remote area (where I could get a landline but can't get DSL or cable internet) and got cellphones to use during the construction project - then decided to try using them with a cell socket rather than installing a landline. Didn't work as well as I'd like.

My phone is an older Nokia model and the service AT&T (now Cingulair) wireless. That company is the only carrier available in the area - and no GSM, just TDMA (and maybe AMPS but I can't tell for sure).

The Cell Socket works reasonably well for voice calls.

It provides charging current when the cellphone is ON hook, but stops when the phone is engaged in a call. (Apparently the power brick is too small to power the cellphone and POTS-emulator line at the same time.)

The Cell Socket doesn't provide a dial tone. Instead (if you pick up the POTS phone when the cellphone is plugged in and ready) it provides a series of three beeps. Apparently these emulate the three beeps you get at the front of an intercept recording. My guess is that this is intended to keep people form trying to use modems and FAX machines with the Cell socket.

I tried programming a modem to use it (ignoring the wait-for-dialtone). But even at the lowest speed setting it would not work with the TDMA cellphone service.

(I hear you can get 1200 baud or so through an AMPS cellphone connection. Unfortunately, my phone was a Nokia with AT&T firmware, and (as far as I can tell) those (at AT&T's insistence) can not be forced to make an AMPS call when a digital carrier is available. So I couldn't test that.)

So it's good for:
- Making long distance calls on your cheep cell plans comfortably.
- Eliminating your long-distance carrier on your landline.
- Using your cellphone anywhere in a house when there's only a few good spots for the signal.
- Putting voice-only service into a remote location, where a landline would be expensive to run (or used too little to justify the expense when you already have a cellphone).

But it's not good for:
- Data
- FAX
- Long calls with little time between them to recharge the cellphone battery.

Re:Phonelabs Dock-n-Talk is an universal dock

[zarthrag]

For the price of a landline AND two cellphones, you just might find an unlimited plan :-p

You need a different cell phone.

[Jerry]

My wife and I have LG VX3100A cell phones, We consider her number to be the "home" phone, regardless of where she is. She uses her phone about 1800 minutes per month and I use about 200 minutes per month. She recharges her phone every Sunday and Wednesday or Thursday, and I recharge my phone every Sunday whether I need to or not.

Getting rid of the land line was the best communication move we ever made. It got rid of the telemarketers, too.

Re:Important Note for users with dialup internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Same applys to mobile/flea market merchants with credit card terminals that dial into their processing center) 99.9% of cellphones are on a digital network (CDMA/TDMA/iDEN/GSM/GPRS/etc) and can not provide the channel clarity needed for analog signals

Bull. Do you know what kind of modem a credit card terminal uses to authorize transactions? A 300 baud old POS. Why? Because there isn't much data to send to the credit card company, and a 300 baud modem will work with the crappiest, noisiest POS phone lines.

Simpler solution:

[man_ls]

Call-Forward your cell phone to your landline. It won't cost anything as long as you're forwarding to another local number (same area code)

for Verizon Wireless customers, this is

*72 + 10-Digit Number to Forward + SEND, wait for the tone, END. (to deactivate, *720 + SEND, wait, END)

Not a hack

[Anonymous Coward]

Asterisk already does least-cost-routing -- you even have a few different options to do it. Don't want to buy the CellSocket... use your BLUETOOTH phone with Asterisk. My celphone has unlimited incoming minutes. I dial my asterisk box and hangup... then it calls me back and gives me a dialtone. No outgoing minutes used.

I just did this!

[donaggie03]

My group and I just finished something very similar to this for our senior project at Texas A&M. We used a Nokia 6100 and a land line phone, a DTMF decoder, a SLIC to convert from single ended to hybrid signals, and a Stamp microcontroller. We chose to drop the land-line subscription altogether. It worked out really well :)