by Dave Altavilla — Wednesday, September 24, 2008

OpenFrame IP Media Phone Runs On Intel Atom

With all the talk of cellular handsets and multi-function devices these days, it's hard to believe that there is still even a market for land lines or VOIP services but of course you know better than that. What's perhaps more interesting than just plain old VOIP telephony and video services like Skype, would be the ability to provide access and functionality for a host of all the various media types; voice, video, text, photos, and interenet services. This is obviously what any traditional Telephony company has to compete with, when you consider the potential for the iPhone, Google's Android platform and other up-and-comers. It seems the folks at OpenPeak have had their eye on the proverbial ball for quite some time now and today they've announced they're putting a little extra muscle behind their product with Intel's new low power Atom processor under the hood.

OpenPeak Inc., today announced a production-ready version of its OpenFrame™ IP media phone platform based on the low-power Intel® Atom™ processor. Designed to drive new revenues for service providers, the OpenFrame device converges voice, data, video and mobile into a single touchscreen-based home communications center that can dramatically simplify everyday family and media interactions.

With the OpenFrame IP media phone connected to the home network via a built-in WiFi/Ethernet link, consumers can use a single device to access applications such as their family calendar, e-mail, text messaging, synced address book and directory services. They also have convenient access to news, sports, weather, stock quotes and traffic, as well as the ability to make traditional or VoIP phone calls.

The same device can also send calendar reminders and driving directions to the user’s mobile; stream and play Internet content such as music, movie trailers and YouTube™ videos; and preview images or video from digital cameras or camcorders.

Use of the Intel Atom processor equipped OpenPeak with a high-performance, low-power development and deployment platform capable of delivering media applications and advanced graphics at market-leading speeds, while also providing wireline voice quality over IP. The fanless, sub-3 watt Intel Atom processor also streamlined the development process and accelerated time-to-market by enabling OpenPeak to write their application on standard Intel architecture.

We'll just have to keep an eye out for an OEM partner picking up on OpenPeak's reference design. The system's features and functionality looks impressive and could potentially breath some additonal life into the consumer IP Telephony market.

Tags: Intel, Phone, Atom, RAM, media, Intel Atom, frame, FRAM, pen, Tom, One, Open, IP, AM