Microsoft makes a telephone? Are they keeping it a secret? Well, in some ways maybe they should keep it a secret, but overall it’s a computer geeks’ telephone, tailor-made for people like me!

I first heard of it from Kevan and Mary Sheridan at our December board dinner, and a few weeks later I started looking for prices on the Internet and got this baby delivered to my door for less than $65. I’d been looking for a cordless phone for some time and hadn’t found one that suited me for any price, until now.

Briefly, it’s a cordless phone in two parts. One is a base station connected to your computer. The second part is the handset and charger base. This is exactly what I’d been looking for – the handset never has to return to the base station to be recharged. I don’t understand why all cordless phones don’t do this. You need to locate the base near a telephone outlet, and the phone itself anywhere you want! Good concept.

So as you may have guessed by now, the system provides you with an answering system facilitated by the computer connection. The connection is by way of a serial port, and the base is actually a voice modem with a 900 MHz radio transmitter/receiver to communicate with the handset. The entire setup is done on the computer in software. It has full voicemail capability, allowing you to set up mailboxes and corresponding announcements.

The handset looks pretty standard except for a number of extra keys. You use the handset to play messages, store and delete them. You can speed dial from a speed dial directory you create on the computer, and you can use its voice recognition capability to speed dial. Yep, it has voice recognition, and it also has computer voice speech, again enabled by the power of your computer. You can use voice commands at the handset to handle messages if you wish. I find it kind of clunky to do that, but I can certainly see an impaired person doing it, and indeed there’s some disability enabling built in and it’s pretty well documented, too.

The handset has a speaker on the back so that you can hear the recorded messages from nearby like a normal recording machine works, but is also used to broadcast announcements when incoming calls come in. It uses caller ID to announce the caller. It looks up the incoming call in the address book for an entry, uses any special announcement you’ve built in for that person and alternately will read the name if it’s transmitted by caller ID, and also announce if the caller ID is blocked or unavailable.

On the computer side, there’s a Call Manager that needs installing. It uses the Address book from Outlook Express for the database, and adds a couple of tabs in the Address book for announcement and also custom greetings. A custom greeting can be made for any person in the address book. It stores all messages as .WAV files and since it goes to the hard drive you don’t have any serious limitations on length and number, although you can choose to limit the length if you wish.

The Call Manager saves all incoming and outgoing calls in a log, saving the number called (if called from the handset) and all numbers received, date, time and duration of each call. You can retrieve messages from the Call Manager, and make calls using speakers and microphone plugged into the sound card. In my case I use a headset and attached microphone. This works for me because I use a networked PC that also is my Internet sharing on my network and don’t care about sound otherwise. This PC is always on anyway and is on a UPS.

There’s much more that this puppy does. It even reads your incoming Internet mail to you if you remotely call in for messages. There’s more, but you can do more research on the Internet if you’re interested.

The downside – there always are some aren’t there? First – the obvious. You have to have your computer on all the time. And it has to be able to run some pretty intensive software at the same time. Speech synthesis and voice recognition (as a separate, concurrent application).

And the criticisms. The handset speaker is cheesy, and that’s a kind description. The telephone is a single line (that’s ok with me). The software isn’t totally reliable, although it’s good in my opinion. I have had a couple of lockups in the last couple of months. The voice command features are slow. (I don’t use them anyway.) The phone is good for a geek like me, but I can’t see it being sold at Best Buy until some more development is done.

Still, I like it and as long as I’m willing to do the care and feeding, my spouse likes it, too. We especially like the voice announcement of incoming calls, and the ease of managing the recorded messages both from the handset and from a remote call, which is excellent.