January 8th, 2007
No Skype, but Ojo's portable and stationary VoIP phones good for ad hoc video calls anywhere
CES VIDEO » 
As broadband Internet connectivity continues to penetrating every corner of the planet and Voice over IP platforms like Skype become ecosystems unto themselves, VoIP devices of all shapes and sizes (many of which are supporting Skype) are turning up everywhere and especially here at CES where VoIP is clearly a major theme. For homes and businesses, even though a lot of VoIP hardware involves a fairly sizeable up-front investment, using the Internet to make calls is an approach that has already proving itself to be dramatically more cost-effective than traditional landline phones. Along with these VoIP approaches (and broadband connectivity) also comes the opportunity to couple the voice with high quality video for making video phone calls. One cool solution I found at CES comes from a company called Ojo.
Ojo offers three different video phones; the PVP-1000 that offers both landline and VoIP connectivty and that has a detachable handset for going cordless, the Shadow (no detachable handset landline support), and for you road warriors out there, a new Ojo phone that can be taken on the road and that can connect via a hardwired connection or WiFi. Ojo claims it to be the first wireless video phone that's not a cell or smartphone and that offers high quality video calling. The idea is that you should be able to take the phone to any hotspot, and start videoconferencing in high quality. Here at CES, as you can see from the video below, we did a clever job of taping a video phone call between the $399 PVP-1000 (with the detachable handset) and the new portable device.
