Invoxia NVX 610 iPhone Desktop Phone Review

Ok so you are definitely wondering what the heck I’m talking about.  iPhone and Desktop Phone what?  So here is the deal:  The Invoxia NVX 610 is a iPhone dock that has bluetooth, a handset cradle, decent speakers, a bazillion microphones in it for conference calls, and it looks pretty nifty.  That doesn’t tell you much.  To be honest, I thought it was stupid.  Who on earth would need this?  It’s not though, if you use your cell phone at the office instead of a landline it is exactly what the doctor ordered.  It lets you dock your iPhone (so it’s constantly charged which is nice).  It has an iPhone App that supports lots of neat features… it connects through bluetooth to your iPhone… and then the world gets better.  You can jam to your playlist and work, then when someone calls the Invoxia takes the call, pauses the music and you pick up the handset instead of the iPhone and talk like you would if it were a landline.  The call clarity is very good…  The only thing I would say is better is my Plantronics headset (clarity wise) and to be honest I still use my headset because I’m used to it and it’s glued to my head all day anyway.

It’s just really handy, you can dial the person you want using the dial pad on your phone or hitting the contacts button and selecting the person, and you can throw it to speaker phone if you have a room full of people and it will act as one heck of a conference phone.  It has (I think) 8 or 9 microphones that are placed all around the unit which means it picks up everyone in the room easily and that really makes things very easy.

The application is developing pretty well there have been several iterations already and the feature list seems to be expanding.  There are some things that are stupid… 1) They require you to have a Skype account.  This is stupid, if you are just going to use the mobile side of things it is completely unnecessary and I do not like being forced to subscribe to a service I’m not going to use (no you don’t have to get a paid account, it is just a pain in the rear end).  When you dial you can’t use their app to do so because it tries to route your calls through skype, it doesn’t ask you which service you would like to use to make the call or allow you to setup a default. (Very stupid).

I’m done with the complaints part of this review   It has a SIP setting that allows you to setup your VOIP account information so you can take your landline calls through the device which is handy.  I haven’t used that portion of it because my Internet connection at the time of this review is a 4G mobile device and while theoretically it should be sufficient I have not had a lot of luck with SIP applications and mobile 3G or 4G services and I didn’t want to rate the call quality under those circumstances.

All in all though the Invoxia NVX 610 is a very promising device.  They need to take out the Skype requirement, allow you to make a default setting for your in-app calls to allow for mobile phone calls, (you can make them through your normal phone interface, it would just be nice to use their app).  It’s very handy, I like to listen to music while I work, and I like the fact that it pauses it like headphones would if you get a call.  The sound quality is very decent and it isn’t loud enough to be a disruption to anyone else (provided you are in an office and not a cubicle).  The price point is high, coming in at $599.99 it isn’t cheap, and I feel like the quality of the device could be quite a bit better for the asking price.  I’d give is 4 stars out of 10 right now.  It needs work but they are on to something so you might want to keep an eye out.  Right now (*in my opinion of course) I’d say their device is worth $150 not $599.99.