Bluetooth Cellular gateway

[Rick_EE]

I just purchased a XLINK Communication Hubs | XLink BTTN Cellular Bluetooth Gateway from an amazon.com partner for $89.

It connects to your cell phone like a hands free headset. You then plug it in to your home phones and it will ring them like a land line. You can do this with up to 3 cell phones.

We have kept our land line mainly for the kids. We want a phone that is always at home. Our goal, if this device works, is to dump our land line ($50/month) and port the line to a cell phone at $10 added to our current plan.

So far I am testing it with my cell phone and keeping the land line for now.

Set up was a breeze. There is a usb port on the device to keep it current with new firmware. The updater did not work on Win7 64 bit. Xp worked fine. Connecting it with a cell phone was just as easy as connecting a bluetooh headset.

I used it last night on an extended convo with my mom. She mentioned that there were some noticible cut-offs. I did not notice a thing. I know bluetooth has interference issues with wi-fi and 2.4 Ghz phones. I may have to do some rearranging of devices.

One big con is caller id. Your caller id is limited to number only, like a cell phone. Even if the name is programmed into your cell phone, the handset only shows the number. I believe this is more a limitation of cellular tech.

It does allow you to use the voice dialing capabliliy in the phone. You just press ## and it will activate.

I will keep testing and see how we like it.

[Sir Skully]

Yeah I'm interested, but its a wait and see....
So please keep this thread updated.....

[Rick_EE]

I have used it only a few times. I am not ready to pull the plug on the landline, yet.

Caller id only shows the number, even if it is programmed in the phone.

On one call, my mom said there were a lot of breakups, though she sounded fine to me. Other people could not tell that I was using it.

I noticed that the call clarity is actually much better on my end. The volume is almost too loud. It shows on a cell phone what they have done to try to preserve battery life.

I started out just having the phone in my kitchen hooked up (5.8 Ghz). When I switched to having all the phones in the house, the 2.3 Ghz phone in the basement had a wierd feedback like sound that changed as move around. I went and bought a $14 5.8 Ghz phone from walmart and that went away. Sound quality was better, too.