NTT's home phone of the future

Telecoms giant NTT tends to be overshadowed by mobile brother DoCoMo when it comes to phones, but it has high hopes for its latest product, a low-priced touch-screen IP videophone that hooks up directly to an ADSL or fiberoptic line. NTT envisages it as the broadband era equivalent of the black Bakelite instrument that marked the telephone's first entry into the average household. No further details regarding spec or pricing are available yet.

The unit is scheduled to go on sale this June and will be available to all subscribers to NTT's broadband services, expanding thereafter to ISPs that use the NTT infrastructure (i.e., an awful lot of them).

NTT has something of a history of coming out with products that end up as footnotes to history because they're easily replaceable with software applications, but the idea of a PC-independent videophone sounds like it might just fly, especially as the artist's impression looks a good deal better than the "phone with a screen stuck to it" designs that seem to have been the mainstream so far.

[Via Ascii24.com (Japanese)]