So, my Asterisk-based home phone service is moving along nicely. I’m still waiting for my Cisco 7940 phone to ship (ebay has things going for it; speed isn’t one of them); I can’t finish all of the UI features that I want until I have the phone in hand. So, my mind’s been wandering, looking for other things to do.

I have a Sony-Ericsson T616 cell phone that I’m kind of ambivalent about. It’s a decent phone, but it’s really too small to talk on for any extended period of time, and the ringer on it is too quiet to hear in a noisy room. I’m prone to missing calls. Fortunately, it has bluetooth. I’ve been using it to sync address book entries with my Mac, but there’s no technical reason I couldn’t use it to tie the phone right into Asterisk, so incoming calls to the cell phone ring straight into our regular home phones whenever the phone’s in bluetooth range.

The opposite side of things–using the cell phone as a cordless phone for receiving calls made to our home phone–isn’t possible with any shipping phone. The phone would need to support the bluetooth “Cordless Telephony Profile,” which no phones currently support.

Grabbing cell calls and stuffing them into Asterisk, on the other hand, should be possible. The bluetooth Handsfree Profile includes all of the abilities needed, including audio, caller ID, call progress, and the ability to dial out. There’s even an open source bluetooth handsfree plugin for KDE. So, making it work with Asterisk would really just be a matter of writting a channel driver that ties Linux’s bluetooth code into Asterisk. Not trivial, but it’s not unexplored territory, either.