Cellphone Into Your Home Phone

Anyone with a cellphone is familiar with this scenario: You come home, take your jacket off, and set your purse or briefcase down near the door. A few hours later, you get your cellphone out of your bag to use it, only to find that you’ve missed three calls because you weren’t close enough to hear your phone ringing. Cellphones rule in lots of places — we can call for car help when stranded along a highway, find friends in a crowd, and be nagged by co-workers or spouses at any time and place. But the old-fashioned wired phone wins at home. When someone calls your house line, extension phones all over the house ring, and can be used to answer the call. With a cellphone at home, you have to schlep it everywhere you go. RCA Cell Docking System RCA Cell Docking System by Thomson Inc. — $149.99/ www.rca.com As more and more households continue to trade in their landlines for cellphones with better calling plans and free long distance, the inconvenience of toting a single cellphone around the house gets more annoying. So, this week we took a look at two products that aim to solve that problem by tying your cellphone into your wired home phone setup. They allow you to use your home phones, including extensions in every room, to place and receive calls through your cellphone and your cellphone calling plan. The two products are the RCA Cell Docking System from Thomson Inc. and the Dock-N-Talk Universal Cellphone Docking Station from Connecticut-based Phone Labs Technology Co. Each costs $150. Both work by directing your incoming cellular calls to a wired phone — and allowing outgoing calls to be made through your wireless network using these telephones. The RCA product comes with a special cordless telephone that links to a cellphone docking station, while the Dock-N-Talk is a small box that connects any corded or cordless home telephone to your cellphone. To use the RCA system in multiple rooms, you need to buy additional cordless handsets for $70 each that work with the RCA system.