The ware for March 2008 was a GE Skype DECT Phone, model 28310EE1. mangel gave a great analysis of the images and also nailed the exact model number of the phone! Congratulations, email me to claim your prize.

I thought one of the interesting features of this board is the fact that it doesn’t bear a GE logo. I had pixelated the logo on the initial photo to try and make the competition a little bit more challenging, but as you can see below the board bears an “RTX” logo.

RTX is actually a Danish company that specializes in ODM product design, and they have several SIP/Skype phones in their portfolio. This is quite typical of a trend that I find a little bit puzzling in US retail. Many of the major brand names, such as Westinghouse, GE, and Kodak do very little consumer electronics product engineering; it’s more typical that the core IP is generated off-shore, either by a European firm or an Asian firm. How these big brand names manage to maintain a grip on the market despite the fact that a smart competitor could easily source the same design and sell into the same market is a testament to how much marketing matters over actual product functionality or usefulness.

I also thought the board was fairly interesting for its integrated antenna structures. The cut-out regions presumably help tune the antenna’s performance and the two elements are positioned at right angles to increase their diversity.

Also, February’s contest was undecided as of the last posting; based upon the revealed plaintexts, Sii is the winner. Congrats, and please email me to claim your prize! I’ll try to get more silicon contests up in the future.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 5:02 am and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.