What is AT&T’s Home Manager?

Cell Phones — 22 September 2008

Scratching your head about AT&T’s Home Manager thingee? In short, it’s a Samsung touchscreen device, that gives you the basics: recipes, weather, scores, movie times and reviews, news, email, and voicemail. AT&T’s demo video is branding it ideal for the kitchen, which is one room PC makers haven’t heavily pushed. If it weren’t for the voicemail integration, it’d be just yet another, albeit cheap, tablet device without a complete web browser. The Home Manager is complimented by a smaller handset, and it’s 7-inch 800×480 screen can double as an LCD photo frame with 256MB of internal storage, expandable via SD card. Calendar and cell phone address books will sync with the device and AT&T phone and cable service looks to be required.

Available now for $299 in select cities.

Official site here

Close up of Home Manager Handset and video review from 3Screens after the ‘leap’

Home Manager Handset

About Author

Christen Costa

Grew up back East, got sick of the cold and headed West. Since I was small I have been pushing buttons - both electronic and human. With an insatiable need for tech I thought "why not start a blog focusing on technology, and use my dislikes and likes to post on gadgets."

Jarrett Gorin

I just got one of these set up in my home and it is very nice. I don’t live in one of AT&T’s current markets for the HomeManager, but every feature of the device, with the exception of “Visual Voice Mail” works just great as long as you have a landline and broadband connection to hook up to it. I purchased mine at a store that was in one of the current Home Manager markets, brought it back to my City, hooked it up, and everything works perfectly.

It is a well thought out device, and has excellent build quality. MUCH nicer hardware than it’s closest competitor, the Verizon Hub, which I also checked out. There is really no comparison.

The software interface on the frame and the handsets is extremely simple and intuitive. And even with plain old non-visual voicemail, the system works just fine, and gives you a visual alert on the frame and the handsets when you have messages waiting (those white squares around the scroll wheel pulse with blue light).

The thing I like best about this system is that you are able to place the hub, which looks like a typical wireless acess point, at the location where you will get the best reception in your home. Unlike most home phone systems, including the Verizon Hub, the DECT antenna is not built in to a handset cradle or the frame base. So it is very flexible to set up, and I get great reception everywhere in and around my home.

Alot of people on the gadget review sites and blogs complain that this thing isn’t a full-blown internet browser. Well, it isn’t supposed to be. I have a laptop, and a desktop for that. They take a long (comparatively) time to boot up. The HomeManager is designed to provide immediate access to limited types of content that you might like to get right away, like news, stock quotes weather, and yellow pages listings. That’s it. It is not designed to replace your computers, and the price tag reflects that. It is VERY good at what it IS designed to do.

The HomeManager is the first home phone system that I have been really happy with in years.

http://www.gadgetreview.com Christen da Costa

Holy exhaustive comment and thanks for taking the time to provide your first hand experience.
Michelle

Will it work if you don’t have AT&T phone service or broadband?

Glen

Sorrry this is a year later, but we used it with Vonage IP Phone service until AT&T IP phone was available in our area. We even had the voicemail working on the base station.

Glen

Our only caveat is that the settings download your email into the device itself, so if you do the email part (we don’t), you might want to get some support help, so all your email doesn’t end up downloaded to the device.

Juli

I LOVE this thing. I have 3 elementary age kids, 3 dogs, a full time job and a husband that does not participate in written calendar events, and the HM has been just what we need. I love the yellow page features, when my kids arrange play dates, I don’t have to run around looking for their school directory to find phone numbers and addresses, I just look it up and it maps the address for me. The only items I would like to see improved is, the calendar’s “recurring appt.” should have and END DATE! If I enter, “soccer practice” recurring every week on Tuesday, and I know it is only until June, I would like to end it on a certain date, like Outlook. The other improvement would be in address book. If I am listing a contact as Tom & Sue Smith, I can only enter a birthdate for one of them, again, just like Outlook, but not in a good way.

Overall, LOVE it! Why are they not marketing this thing to death to busy moms like me????