Have you ever wished you could get the weather, check the
score of the baseball game, order a pizza, and spy on your kids all from one
convenient screen? Well, with the Verizon Hub Phone, you can now. It combines
all the fun of a landline VoIP phone with the fun of the internet…and I’m
pretty sure that’s never been done before.
The Hub essentially combines the greatest features—okay, the
bottom-line features—of online services like traffic reporting and a calculator
and appends them to a bottom-line touch screen handset. The premise here is to
create a central location—or hub—for all your communication needs. Wanna order
movie tickets, there’s an app for that. Wanna look at the calendar without
actually walking over to the calendar, there’s an app for that…and that’s
about it. The Verizon Hub is surprisingly limited despite its level of
connectivity. That being said, what apps they do provide are quite effective at
what they do. For instance, the calendar apps can sync with every family
member’s cell phone, so you’ll always been in the know when the plane’s leaving
for your family Christmas trip. And if you’re some kind of negligent parent and
you leave your kid home alone, well than he can track just how far away you made
it before you realized with the Chaperone feature (a service Verizon offers that
allows you, in most cases, to track the whereabouts of your delinquent children).
Then there’s the VZ Navigator app that allows you to send
maps and directions to family cell phones. A pretty handy feature, especially
considering wireless data charges that you would accrue looking up those
directions on the go.
The design and interface of the Hub is quite sleek and
straight forward, though it can be cumbersome as the touchscreen on the handset
is not as precise as it should be. So while one cannot rank aesthetics above
functionality, there are trade-offs on both ends.
But the ultimate question is ‘why?’ Most of these apps can be replicated on your
computer or your cell phone itself, neither of which indenture you and your
family to Verizon. Furthermore, why pay a
$200 hit for such a product (with a $35/month for VoIP service)? And the answer
is a simple one: if it fits.
The Verizon Hub is a niche product, one geared towards a
family that wants to be entirely connected without relying on the ‘tech savvy’
it takes to replicate the services on a PC or cell phone itself. Certainly it’s
a product worth considering if you’re already a Verizon customer looking to get
your family in sync in a streamlined fashion. Just know, there are other
options out there.
