Snom Technology AG out of Germany, one of my personal favourite IP phone developers, has announced the first entry in their new series, the Snom 820.

Snom 820

Snom 820



I’ve always been a big fan of the Snom phones. I have a Snom 320 at home, and a Snom 190 at work. While these certainly aren’t their top of the line products, they’re also not the bottom of the line. The 320 does absolutely everything I need out of an IP phone and then some.

But it does have one small issue. Like most IP desk phones, it runs off of wired ethernet. As I have mine at home in the family room, and the nearest switch is two rooms away, I used to run an incredibly annoying ethernet cable across the floors and ceilings. It was unsightly and I always managed to trip over any portion that happened to be on the floor. In an attempt to alleviate this, I started using these old Logitech Wireless Play Link devices, which are essentially RF ethernet, to connect the phone to the network. It has worked beautifully and flawlessly. Unlike wireless game bridges, there’s no configuration required (the Play Links are paired together with an RF code, so there’s no IP associated with them). Unfortunately, they’re big, blocky, and each requires its own separate power source. This makes the wire-free version of my Snom 320 need a total of 3 power plugs altogether — one for the phone, and one for each Play Link half.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a working solution, and I’m happy with it. But it’s by no means elegant.

The new Snom 820, however, has wi-fi built in. In an office environment, you could use power over ethernet (PoE), or wi-fi to cut down on cabling. I’ll just be thrilled to have a sharp design and the elegance of wi-fi cable-free life without extra gadgets. Not only that, but the colour screen on the Snom 820 looks pretty sharp in the pictures, and at a full 320×240 resolution, that’s to be expected.

Add in some impressive features like wide-band CODECs and built-in VPN client technology, and you have one incredibly impressive phone that I really do hope lives up to the standard for reliability I’ve come to expect from Snom. I’m eager to get my hands on one and see the rest of the 8xx series. If the 820 matches closest to the 320 did in the line, I wonder if we can expect a more basic 800, and a more advanced 860 and 870.

I am not, however, eager to see if this does to the 3xx series what the 3xx series did to the 1xx series. The Snom 190 has some serious flaws that I’m usually able to ignore. But the most annoying of which this week has been it has no way to update the Daylight Savings Time on it. And the moment they released the 3xx series, all firmware releases for the 1xx series stopped completely. This means many things simply never got fixed that should have been fixed (updated firmware, issues with the speakerphone buttons, etc). I’m hoping they don’t do this to the 3xx series when the 820 comes out.