Getting your mobile to play with your landline

Mobile phones are brilliant. Mine is always in my pocket. Making calls is very easy, just click on the contact on the list, or the number in an email or web page, and off you go. 

What I want to do is to connect my mobile to my landline so I can use it as a cordless phone as well. Using my mobile to make outgoing calls on my old-fashioned twisted pair avoids the enragingly weak and inconsistent mobile signal in my house (there is a little-known 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Have No Coverage in Thine Own House, Thou Scabrous Sinner). And calls on my landline are free in the evening and at weekends.

Being able to take landline calls on my mobile is also a benefit as I don't have to faff about hauling the cordless out of the depths of the sofa.

And this is exactly what the SwissVoice Voice Bridge does. The little box plugs into the phone socket and an ethernet port on your home hub (and mains power, of course). Voice calls are translated into digital form and fed into the wireless network to be picked up by your mobile. It is simple, reasonably priced (eighty sovs on amazon.co.uk) and works as advertised. 

Well, almost as advertised. As so often, the free app lets it down.

For a start, it is iPhone only. As an iPhone refusenik this means using it on my iPad and that is not a happy experience. The app fills the whole screen so everything is blown up like a kids' spelling book. Worse, it won't rotate so must be used in portrait mode, making it impossible to plug the charger in at the same time.

But the 'feature' that makes me gibber with rage is the dialler. It is too stupid to handle (0) correctly, so half the numbers in my contacts have to be edited before they can be dialled. And you can't paste numbers in, so if you want to dial a number on a website you have to memorise it (or write it down) and press the buttons in the old-fashioned way. 

Finally, it won't let you record the call in another app. I need to do this to capture interviews using the brilliant Livescribe 3 digital pen, that no journalist should be without. I can record Skype calls in the Livescribe+ app, why not on the Voice Bridge?

An Android app is due in October - let's hope it is a little better. And an iPad app is coming next year. 

One of the great powers of digital and the internet is that sound hardware that is let down by crap software can be cured by software developers. So I live in hope that this genius bit of kit will soon live up to my modest expectations. Not hard, surely.

PS one of the things about my iPad that generates many mighty oaths is that dialing by selecting a phone number in an email or web page only seems to work with fucking Facetime. Anyone know how to redirect this to Voice Bridge (or, indeed, Skype)?