Here are some of the things that we discovered about the GSC3570. Not all of these are technical; some are opinions. Honestly, we found little wrong with the firmware and most of these things are things we think could be improved to make the device more useful.
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Everything is fine, but like any touchscreen, it is a magnet for fingerprints. An option might be to sell additional screen protectors that can be replaced as they get dirty or damaged.
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Our tester had no problem setting the phone up with wifi for the first time.
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Minor points off for putting the speakers on the back instead of the front. Points off for awkward wall-mount design. Points off for no camera or Bluetooth capabilities.
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GDMS, obviously, is a must. You’re doing great things with GDMS and we’d hate to see newer devices get lost as your product suite enlarges.
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Our biggest concern is that this will be a “low-level” device with more advanced devices coming later. If that’s the case, we’ll likely never sell or install one of these because customers will want the more advanced devices. In which case, the question becomes one of differential cost vs differential utility.
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It really comes down to this: AS IT IS NOW, the unit is basically a speakerphone on the wall with available connections to detect and/or trigger a few things in the real world. A Raspberry PI can do more than this unit does for less money, even if you factor in the cost of a touch screen for an RPi. The unit seems to be lacking in market segmentation.
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Who is it for? Who is going to use it? What are they going to do with it? Why would they pay money for this if there were something else with small incremental cost but large incremental usefulness? Why would they buy this if there were something cheaper that did the same thing? How long does it take to install one? If you didn’t install it during build-out, how much will it cost to run new wires to install it now?
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The device cannot be used for building control or security because the device itself is not secureable. You cannot use some sort of authorization method to prevent someone from opening a door. Which means if someone breaks in, they just walk over to the device and press “open” and now the door opens for all their friends to come in.
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As it’s built now, it only really works where there is a need for someone to buzz open a door where there isn’t already a way to buzz open a door. If we’ve got GDS units in place, then we’ve got GXP phones that can open them. None of our customers are going to stand up and walk to a wall to open a door when they can do it from their desk.
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Add Android (mainly for push notifications and real-time calendar capabilities), a camera, motion sensor, light sensor, and emergency light and you have a device we can sell to universities.
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Audio calls work as expected with good quality.
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The device itself is fine. Volume could be louder, both from the speaker. Microhpone gain could be upped a bit; it’s somewhat soft when listening to from other phones unless someone gets right up close to it.
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For a wall-mount device, it’s adequate. We would also like to see an enclosure of some sort that would allow this to be placed on a conference room table and used as a master control device for conference features and the like.
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Unfortunately, as a wall-mount unit, it looks awkward stuck on the wall at a particular angle. An in-wall mount bezel option would be nice so it could be flush with the wall during new construction. However, this would kill the speaker output so you’d need to move the speakers to the front of the unit.
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We would like to be able to rearrange and/or disable the buttons on the screen. For instance, if we don’t have anything to monitor, we’d like to remove that button. Also, we’d like to move SOS call to the top
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Needs to be a security code so people can’t poke at the settings without knowing what the code is.
SO much about this unit is promising, but it’s also missing SO much as well.
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It’s not Android, Linux, or any other embedded OS that can run OTS software; it’s Grandstream firmware, and while that’s fine for a medium desktop phone, we think this device should be running Android or embedded Linux to offer a much great suite of product capabilities.
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If it had those capabilities, and assuming it’s mounted on a wall inside (or outside) of a conference room, then it could be used to display the schedule for that room, offer capabilities for people to schedule the room in the future, display building safety or other alert push notifications, be used as a “blue light” one-touch safety phone, participate in audio conferencing (video as well if a camera were added to the unit or Bluetooth capabilities were added).
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Assuming it’s not used by a single person, we see it more useful as part of building infrastructure but only for a small portion of the building. Conference room or restricted access areas, for instance, at universities or larger corporations.
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No Android (and no access to some app store)
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No camera
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No bluetooth
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No desktop option
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No flush-mount wall bezel option
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No security on screen
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No customization of screen
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Would be nice to be able to change the blue background to match color in use at customer’s site
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Device can’t figure out if it’s a glorified phone with a video doorbell option or a glorified video doorbell with a phone option
