CyberLogic Blog

I was recently lucky enough to have a Grandstream GXV3140 IP multimedia phone given to me for testing. From the outset, my impressions were very good. The packaging was of a high quality and certainly added to the excitement of getting the device up and running. It didn’t take very long to do just that! Setup was very easy and integrating it into our Trixbox PABX was child’s play. We had two units in our office and it wasn’t long before we were making video and phone calls to each other.

The unit comes with a 4.3″ TFT colour LCD, 1.3 Megapixel camera and dual Ethernet ports so that you can have both your phone and your computer connected via a single network point. PoE is not available for this model. It would have been a nice addition but then there are more expensive models that do offer that functionality.

Being a multimedia phone, it comes with a host of web applications such as a web browser, IM, MSN, Google, Skype, Facebook, RSS feeds for weather, news and stocks, etc. Other features include Internet radio, multimedia streaming from the Internet, SD support, USB support, and Flickr web photo albums. It also has a built-in alarm clock, calendar, games etc. The list of features was very impressive and we found it quite useful to have some of these feeds, such as the weather forecast, available at a glance.

The firmware version that was on the phone didn’t have Skype installed on it but apparently Skype is included with more recent firmware updates. I did, however, manage to test other Social Media platforms such as Facebook and MSN. For these apps, I found navigating around via the buttons to be a little cumbersome compared to doing it on a computer. The same applies to the web browser. If there is a computer handy, that will be your first choice for browsing, but failing that it’s very nifty to have a quick way of getting on to the Internet.

The core functions of the phone are very good indeed. The voice and video quality are both superb, as we’ve come to expect from Grandstream, and we liked the fact that the frame rates are displayed on the screen during video calls. This particular model is not a touch screen (see the GXV3175 7″ for that), so all inputs are performed by buttons. This took some getting used to, but once I got the hang of it I found the menu navigation to be fairly simple.

All in all the GXV3140 is a crisp, clear and very capable phone. It’s easy to setup and configure, and it has a quality feel about it. If you need voice and video calling at an affordable price, this is certainly a good phone to consider. It would even make a nice bedside phone, removing the need for a separate alarm clock and giving you quick access to the weather forecast for the next day. If want something a little more powerful, with touch screen functionality, I’d consider the Grandstream GXV3157 model as an alternative. Both of these phones are available from Miro Distribution.