POTD: Analog Sets, TRYP, Midtown Manhattan, NY

 

 

This is the cordless phone at the hipster hotel I had stayed when I was in New York City back in October.  As you can tell it’s one of those Teledex, analog sets. No hotel I’ve ever stayed had any native phone system’s sets in the rooms. I guess it’s above my paygrade to stay at a five-star hotel that may have digital or IP sets. I do know the Teledex markets an ‘iPhone” (surprised that didn’t hit Apple’s or Cisco’s lawyers!) that’s a generic SIP phone that functions like an analog set but works on top of an IP network.

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POTD: Urban Outfitters – West 34th Street

Being the Avaya Red fanboy that I am, I am always happy to see any phones from the legacy AT&T/Bell System days. As I have stated before, this vendor had 90%+ of the Fortune 500 and then lost it entirely with a company with legacy roots that was 125 years old.

Taken in October of 2017, I am unable to tell what set this is, it could be a 1416 or a 1616. The second digit model numbers  what type of signaling it does to make them ether be a “telephone” or a “terminal”. Please read the section on “voice terminals” to remind yourself why your desk phone is not actually that…

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POTD: TRYP Hotel, Midtown Manhattan

In today’s installment of phones other than Cisco seen in The Big Apple, this was where I and my companion stayed during the week of the NY NAB Show. Known as TRYP (probably an acronym for “trip” though my mother called it T.R.Y.P. for a while) is a hipster themed hotel on West 35th between Seventh and Eighth. An independent franchise to Wyndham, this hotel is in one little building. I think it’s like a motel in a low rise building. There are fifteen stories and you can see the flagship New Yorker from the top.

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POTD: Tick Tock Diner, Midtown Manhattan, NY

If you ever visit the West Side of Manhattan, and you like an awesome breakfast, go to the Tick Tock Diner, underneath the New Yorker on Eighth Ave between West 34th and 35th streets. Or should I say the iconic Art-Deco, classic mid 20th Century style of the Wyndham owned hotel? Anyways, I had a Smore French Toast.  Something along those lines…

Enough with food porn on The Museum, but you wanted to see their phones right?

Left looks like the one for the diner, a NEC set for their Electra line, and a Mitel 5330E VOIP set with a backlit display and perhaps a Gigabit Ethernet connection! This is probably used for the hotel communications, and for the use of room service. I can say Mitel is used at these clusters of hotels, because I stayed in TRYP, and I saw my phones on the front desk…

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POTD: B&H Store, New York City

I’ve received many B&H catalogs ether as hand me downs, and runins with people on the West Coast, or in the mailings these days, but I never made it there till October. I’m familiar with J&R in the Lower Manhattan area though.

Located on the West Side of Manhattan, just a couple blocks away from the Garment District (the off Fifth Ave stores that go from West 34th & 5th to 35th and 8th. I made the visit since it was on the way to the Javits Center, for that fluke of an East Coast NAB Show. This place is a must if you like broadcast grade A/V equipment (the enterprise class for videographers, audio, what have you.) I got studio grade headphones there, and you can buy any professional and commercial class stuff there. And if you can’t make it to New York, you can go online.

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POTD: Jacob Javits Center, Upper West Side, Manhattan

The Jacob Javits Center, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the urban outskirts of New York City, is where conferences are held. Much less space than say the Las Vegas Convention Center. It’s comparable size like Connecticut’s or the ones in Boston. Unlike Vegas, people are rude, uptight and do not take any selfies with showgirls. They will tell you explicitly to “not tag” them.

This was taken in October at the fall NAB Show, the convention for the National Association of Broadcasters. Unlike my visit in April, there was nothing to write home about.  In fact I spent more time outside the Javits Center

This Guest Services desk shows a Cisco 8800 series VOIP set. However, throughout my visit, my first time ever visiting the city beyond twelve hours – I saw sets that weren’t just Cisco in various businesses and organizations.

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POTD: Avaya 4610 *One-X Quick Edition* IP set

Back in 2013, I acquired an Avaya 4610 IP set. However, not to long after the acquisition, I’ve found out that this was a special version. A very strange one to say the least. I would’ve retuned this to the eBay seller as a “Not as Described” claim but I don’t like pulling that unless I really have to.

For a period of time from 2006 to 2008, Avaya marketed (albeit with limited fanfare) a peer to peer IP phone system called the One-X Quick Edition. To be honest, I never understood the brand.

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POTD: Local Papa Gino’s

Sadly, where I live, Avaya or Nortel isn’t “alive and well” unlike another site I follow. Nortel has disappeared in my state in public and private entities in lieu of Cisco years ago and Avaya Red has slowly disappeared too.

On a Christmas Eve tradition before I was born, my family would order pizza out at the local Papa Ginos, that is local chain with more than one hundred stores around the Greater Boston region, basically in four of the six New England states. It’s reputation is fresh quality pizza of with quality ingredients. Over the years Papa’s has had exclusive marketing deals with the local Boston teams such as the Red Sox and currently the Patriots.

The chain has used AT&T products going back to the days of Western Electric. This location I had frequented growing up had used one of those 10 line 1A2 wall mount Key telephones till a cutover around 2001 to a Partner ACS system. The only ComKey I’ve ever seen in production was another store nearby, and that had cutover to a Partner circa 2001 or 02.

I’ve been to mostly the New Hampshire stores, and D’Angelo the sub shop, is a sister brand to Papa Ginos. I don’t recall them using any phone systems, the one nearby me, that I took a few years back with an Avaya van uses POTS phones.

But today, just the next block away from that same D’Angelo, I noticed  this phone. Nope, its not a 9600 Avaya IP or 9500 DCP set. No, worse a Polycom VVX 310 set. (I haven’t been here for a while, some days I normally walk here because it’s not that far away from my home.)

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