Dear Cisco, wtf are you thinking with the Umi?

[theducks]

As an expatriated person, I find myself thinking of home sometimes. Video conferencing with people from the old country is fun, so I thought I'd have a look at the details on Cisco's new Umi video conferencing unit.

Let me say, I have no idea what they're thinking here. It's for home use. It costs $599. Then, you have to pay $24/month for a plan to use it. To call other people who have a Umi.

Because it doesn't work with Skype, or FaceTime. Or anything other than Google Video chat (which is itself free for non PSTN calls).

So basically, you're charging as much as a computer + webcam (which you could hook up to a TV), you can't connect to Skype, and you're charging a monthly fee for something everyone else is giving away for free.

Let me know how that works out for you...

Comments

[belladonna.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha. Remember the videophones in the 80s? That's what it sounds like.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

Aimed at telecommuters whose companies have bloated IT budgets perhaps? Does it have some special just-working-ness with respect to a corresponding, popular Cisco corporate videoconferencing system?

I noticed the other day that one of my clients seems to have a permanent warm body just to keep a videoconferencing room functioning (or that's that staff member's main duty). Seems to be regarded as an acceptable cost.

[wintal.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this Umi thing does what it says it does well... but a comparison to Skype or Facetime is a bit broken.

There's actually a lot of scope for this to be a good value proposition. It has a PTZ camera which is actually quite hard to get in a webcam form factor. It has optical zoom, which sounds important to me if you're shoving it on top of a tv. It quite possibly has a microphone array with decent noise cancellation, something sadly missing from most skype and facetime setups.

The per month cost is an interesting one - if they use it to enable multi-way conferencing, then I'm ok with it... if it's just for missed calls and shit then it's a bit of a waste of money. A 3rd party service is a requirement for multi-way conferencing to not suck though.

It also has the 'plug and play' aspect, which is valuable to a lot of people this is aimed at.. you know, grandparents.