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Review of the new Snom 370

snom 370This month I finally had the chance to test one of the first snom 370 IP phones that arrived to the US and had the opportunity to install and test it before that model was released to the market. As you might know the snom 370 is the new top of the line IP phone Snom has brought to the market. Basically, it is similar to the snom 360 but with an improved display and new hard keys.

Overall a phone that has a distinctive look and looks well in the boardroom or on the CEOs desk as well as for the engineering or sales management teams. Many of the readers are familiar with snom IP phone product line and the snom 360 so I won’t discuss the many nice features already available in the other snom’s and only focus on the highlights of what’s new and what really caught my attention. If you want the official details, here is link to the product datasheet: datasheet.

The new glossy high resolution, grayscale, backlit display most obvious feature is the definitely one of the most striking differences. The phone has a true grayscale high-resolution quality display with a great look-n-feel. The new display allowed me to have multiple lines per call to show me a lot more details about my calls. The snom 370 is the ideal executive phone. It has a great design and truly looks better than most phones on the market. The new display presents both text and pictures with much higher definition and supports grayscale. The support team or IT staff will find it as easy to configure and maintain as the rest of the snom family and some of the new menu functions and wizards actually make it faster to setup than ever. When having multiple calls on hold I was able see all of them in the display and select the one I want to resume or transfer. A receptionist often has three or four calls on hold at the same time and it becomes difficult to remember who was in which line in order to transfer the call.

Snom 370 display


Receptionists will enjoy the phone with the extended keypad connected so they can transfer calls and monitor more than 40 additional extensions. I noticed that the snom 370 has a much better speaker/sound quality than the other members of the snom 300 family, but since the audio quality is already good in other snoms it will go unnoticed by most. The unit has an improved speaker with a separate chamber and some acoustic insulation material and supports a high definition codec making the snom 370 one of the few High Definition sound phones on the market.The phone’s web GUI is also almost the same as the other snom’s so there is no learning curve when configuring the snom 370. Even better, for new installers now the GUI has a link next to each configurable setting that opens a window from snom wiki with explanation on the setting. For beginners that is a real cool feature that really shortens the learning curve of snom phones. I have never seen this before and really liked the way snom built this into the phone interface.The four context soft keys are programmable now. Notice the word Directory is misspelled in this early firmware version but should be fixed now. Another nice option I found is the drop down list to specify the type of IP-PBX server the phone will connect to. Currently the phone supports only Broadsoft, Sylanto and PBXnSIP. You can use the phone with any SIP compliant server but if your server is listed then the many configuration settings the device has reverts into the factory pre-set ideal configuration for that softswitch. Most systems require some special configurations and the snom 370 will be automatically set and interoperate with the most optimized settings without any need of further configuration of obscure settings in the advanced settings pages. Considering that IP Phones can have 500+ settings it’s very nice to have the most popular settings plus some custom settings pre-configured.

 snom 370

Other ways to take advantage of the new high-resolution display is being able to load a crisp high-resolution company logo. Hosted PBX companies can use that to load their own or their customers logo to the phones and position their brand and maintain customer loyalty. Some SIP servers allow callers send their picture URL when placing the call, the snom 370 will show in the display not only the caller ID name and number but also her picture.

Last but not least what I like the most is the embedded XML minibrowser, now with more room in the display to create cooler and productivity boosting applications that now show better in the display. With an XML standardized way to communicate the phone with a server, many web based applications can be developed for the phones and integrated with larger systems. Here are just some examples of what it can be done, I’m sure that many of the readers can think of other applications for the different industries they catter to.

+ Ticker application would query and show current stock prices.
+ CRM application can show details or history of person calling.
+ Hosted pbxs can show current balance for the account.
+ Sales person can quickly quote or show payments schedule.
+ A lawyer can record the time spent with a customer on the phone and automatically adjust customer balance.
+ Executives can see company’s key performance values with a press of a button.
+ Company directory or customer phone number lookup in the phone.

Asterisk implementators can combine some of the XML features, Action Url settings and Asterisk call control functions to develop custom integrated telephony applications to companies and have an additional revenue for systems integration services. The phone also comes with more memory for loading larger phone books, ringtones and display pictures. It is ready for supporting future new firmware becasue it aleviates memory constraints for development of new features.In summary, there are no revolucionary changes but certainly a robust list of strong new features and a real cool new high resolution screen. Now you have a snom phone model to sell that can be compared with top of the line Cisco and Polycom IP phones and beat them on most if not all specifications.
Definitely A Better Phone :) Henry        

Posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 2:26 pm under ABP BLOG, Advanced Solutions, Asterisk Focus, IP-PBX Solutions, ISP/ITSP BLOG, VAR Partners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Review of the new Snom 370”

  1. SinoLogic » Review del Snom 370 Says:
    May 24th, 2007 at 3:44 pm

    [...] Aquí el enlace: http://www.abptech.com/blog/review-of-the-new-snom-370/ Etiquetas:snom, terminales ip, voip 24-Mayo-2007 a las 9:36 [...]

  2. ipguru Says:
    May 29th, 2007 at 11:45 am

    Great revew of snom 370. Looking for more info on snom headset adapters.

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