On VUC session of Friday, July 10th we were able to give away one of the new A580IP phones from Gigaset. Congratulations to conference regular Karl Fife of “The Karl Experience” for winning the phone. We know he’ll put it to good use by calling in to the conference each week!

The contest consisted of finding the movie whose soundtrack featured the VoIP-appropriate song “Calling You”. Karl was first to type  “Bagdad Cafe” in our IRC channel #voip-users-conference on Freenode.net. The song is a beautiful, haunting piece of music and I would like to use an excerpt from time to time in our opening or closing theme.

Thanks again to Tony Stankus, Product Manager of Emerging Technologies Gigaset Communications USA, LLC for providing this phone as a prize and for being a great guest. I am counting on Tony to come back and tell us when the phone features evolve, which they do from time to time.

Early on, we spoke about the lack of a mute button on the S675IP, and lo and behold, they added one to firmware, which is easy to update. The phone shows a message when new firmware is ready, and asks if you want to update. See the original post for more articles on these phones.