Last month’s deployment of AT&T’s U-verse Voice in my home represented a fundamental shift in the way I look at my residential telephony service. And now, with today’s introduction of its HomeManager™ product offering, the phone company as we no longer know it, is extending the value chain in helping me integrate and manage all of my IP services in the home.
Read AT&T Press Release here.
Here's my review, shot in my home, here:
Overview
The AT&T HomeManager consists of three devices: the HomeManager Frame, HomeManager Handset, and HomeManager Base.
The HomeManager Frame is a cordless touch screen device with a vivid 7 inch color display that provides easy access to your address book, as well as your call logs, voice mail, Yellow Pages and White pages, weather, news, email calendar digital photos and videos – and it’s a speaker phone. It has the look and feel of a scaled down tablet PC and could be a hint of form factors to come, especially in light of Intel’s recent announcement of its Urban Max prototype displayed last month.
The HomeManager Handset is what it is- a handset but with the feel of something more like a Cisco, Nortel or Avaya office IP phone you see in the enterprise.
The HomeManager Base which hooks into the Residential Gate way serves as a means to connect to the Frame and Handset.
First Impressions:
It looks really cool. Especially the HomeManager Frame.
It was easy to install.
I was up and going in about 10 minutes. The directions are easy to read and follow.
The HomeManager Frame got me thinking about how I consume and apply information. In the case of Yellow Pages, the HomeManager Frame is a great application – and a better application than having Yellow Pages on U-verse TV. Frankly, Yellow Pages on U-verse TV is slow and cumbersome. But on the HomeManager Frame it’s fast and easy to use. Oh- by the way, I still use the paper version of the Yellow Pages which sits on a shelf in the kitchen.
While you can get your email on the HomeManager Frame, it’s sort of clunky and not as elegant as checking or composing email or texts on my iPhone. The HomeManager Frame also comes with a pen stylus for tapping text instead of using your fingers.
The address book is a good idea, but you are out of luck in trying to sync it if you have an iPhone. If you are a subscriber to the AT&T Mobile Backup Service, you can set your address book to automatically sync with your AT&T mobile phone address book on select phones. (If you have an iPhone, I highly recommend the MobileMe service which syncs your PC/iPhone/and your .Me account in the cloud).
One thing that the HomeManager Frame does display – and can be your screen saver, is the weather. This is a case where this type of device lends itself best for a certain type of information that I want to have at my disposal.
The lesson here is that there is no one device or communications platform that can be all things to all consumers. The other lesson is that slowly but surely, AT&T is helping me build out a small-scale enterprise network in my home with service options that can be deployed on a variety of hardware platforms. At the end of the day, it can be my TV, my PC, my wireless device, or now my Frame.
Pricing:
The basic HomeManager offering is on sale starting today for $299. Additional handsets are available for $69 each. I wonder why AT&T doesn’t offer a $100 rebate if you sign up for U-verse, or at the very least, let you put 10 non-interest payments of $29 per month on your phone bill.
Availability:
You may purchase your HomeManager today in the following major AT&T markets: Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles. I assume others will follow as they roll the product out.
Highly Recommended
