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A Woburn company is taking us one step closer to the promise of Dick Tracy-style technology.
This week, Pingtel Corp. announced what it says is the world's first Java-based, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephone, to be priced at about $550 and becoming available in the fall.
Pingtel is calling its new telephone "xpressa." Pingtel chief executive officer and cofounder Jay Batson likened xpressa to the Palm handheld computers.
"While most people use Palm as a personal organizer, it excelled because it was an open application platform," Batson said. "It runs Java. It can run built-in applications, but it is also open to third-party applications."
Pingtel debuted its device recently at ComNet 2000, a conference in Washington, D.C. showcasing how telephony services would be delivered over a multi-vendor, multi-protocol wide area network.
At the conference, Pingtel touted its vision for what the Gartner Group calls a $19 billion market for the "next generation" telephone climate in the United States. Gartner Group executive John Coons says that the industry needs complete interoperability between developers of gateways, gateway controllers, IP devices and applications to meet...