Experiencing A World of Wireless At Home

With all the work I do from home, I am on the phone quite a bit. If I had landline in addition to my cell phone, I think it would be great to have them both integrated into one device. This is actually possible with Uniden's latest ELBT595 phone.

I would classify the ELBT595 as an extremely flexible home or home/office phone. It's nothing like I've ever seen before since it integrates your land line phone and cellular phone together into a single handset using Bluetooth technology. You don't have to worry about listening for two different phones ringing with this.

All you need to do to make it work properly is pair the ELBT595 phone via Bluetooth with your cell phone. It works with most Bluetooth capable phones, but unfortunately does not work with all. The clarity of your connection will depend on whether or not you have a strong Bluetooth link with your base station.

The ELBT595 allows you to receive and make phone calls up to 150 feet away from the base station. You can wander around the house or possibly outside in the yard without having to worry about a cord. If you want to become a true wireless king/queen you can even pair a Bluetooth headset to the phone. If you do this, you'll have to keep the handset a maximum of 15 feet away from you because of the Bluetooth range. If you want to, you can even use the phone as a baby monitor or intercom.

It comes with a speakerphone and answering machine base station that plugs into your analog line and it has a 5.8 GhZ cordless flip-style handset. If you want to get really serious, you can purchase and connect up to ten handsets to a single base station. The flip-style handset looks like a cell phone and has many of the same features that a typical cell phone would have such as the ability to load your contact information from Microsoft Outlook. You can plug the phone right into your PC with an included USB cable and program the options on your phone with a easy-to-use windowed interface.

The Uniden ELBT595 is a neat device to have for the home, but fairly pricey. If you're completely adamant about converging your two phones together, this could be a good purchase for you. It is available for $250 at CompUSA or www.uniden.com.