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Vonage V-Phone misses the boat
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Poor Vonage. It's jump into public trading has become arguably the worst performing 2006 IPO to date; Verizon is suing them for patent infringement; and the world's reaction to their over-hyped V-Phone is a resounding meh. The next step in their marketing disaster plan should be to take on Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens as a product spokesperson. After all, how much worse can things get?
Everybody seems happy to give a big thumbs up for the design of this shiny orange stick of voip-licious portability. We loves us the keychain gadgetry, yes we do. And it does, in fact, function as billed: sort of a voip internet phone-on-the-go that you can just stick into random computers and make calls with. Where it falls down, it seems, is in the coulda-shoulda department.
Vonage's complete lack of support for Mac and Linux users is bad enough, but that they should fail to grasp the essence of voip's portability in a product that is ALL ABOUT portability...well, friends, some things are simply unforgivable. The natural step, in a product like this, would be the ability to take your phone number with you where ever you go. Kind of like a cell phone. Convergence anyone?
Instead, they take a page from Ma Bell's profit-growing cookbook and make you sign up for another phone line if you want the portability. That's right. The V-Phone won't link to your existing Vonage account. And without that, this keychain eyecandy is little more than a 256MB USB flash drive with a softphone program, all wrapped up in orange plastic.
On a brighter note, since the technology involved is decidedly un-proprietary, voip service providers who aren't being slaughtered on Wall Street should have no problem coming up with their own improved versions of this phone-in-a-stick.
