Fingerprint Secured Phones

PBX vendor Avaya and Lenovo (the Chinese company who have for a long while manufactured IBM's PCs) have announced that they will cooperate, by putting Avaya softphones onto Thinkpad notebooks. So far, so what?

The nice twist, I think, is that the softphone will be linked into the fingerprint scanner on the Thinkpad, so will refuse to work without proper fingerprint authentication. So if the laptop gets stolen (as many do including around 40 per year that go missing from the FBI) at least the thieves won't be able to make loads of free calls too.

For more, see the story at Internetnews.com.

Reply from blakewright on Mar 14, 2007 - 10:33 AM

Be more impressive if they integrated a hardware based solution into the laptop. One that would run independantly of the OS, even when the rest of the machine was "powered off" but still use the same ethernet port. Also maybe allow for a regular PSTN phone device to use the rj-ll modem port as an FXS (or the option to run from the audio out+mic in with headset). Maybe even the ability to use the WiFi connection sans-OS running. Then authenticate it all with the fingerprint reader.

Be a bit large in comparison to a handheld device, but the battery life would be good in comparison.

As it is, sounds like they've just written a soft phone that refuses to run without fingerprint authentication, still not too revolutionary.

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