Back in 2009, Cloud Telecomputing introduced Glass, one of the first IP phones to incorporate Android (News - Alert) on the desktop.   As the company starts to ship handsets in quantity, others are rolling out their spins on Android desktop phones for the business world.   ESI and Panasonic (News - Alert) have both announced new phones incorporating Android.

ESI showed off the ESI 250 smartphone for the Desktop at the evening ShowStoppers event at CES 2012. The phone features a seven-inch color touch screen, Android 2.2, a standard numeric dial pad and some dedicated buttons for functions such as pulling up contacts, voice mail, hold, record and mute. There's a big red light on the top right-hand corner of the phone to indicate call/hold status and a smaller blue light to indicate voice mail is waiting. ESI (News - Alert) said it was planning to ship the phone in the second quarter of 2012 at a price around $300 for handset.

The ESI 250 is designed to work/be sold with ESI's IP Server 900 as part of an IP PBX (News - Alert) package installed by a certified reseller. Like Glass, you'll find there's a set of baseline Android apps that have been ported to the ESI phone, plus a couple of apps that have been customized for business users. Features include contact synchronization; enhanced presence management (including RFID access control); enhanced conference calling including meet me conference; find me, follow me; call routing; and call recording.

In comparison, Panasonic's KX-UT670 phone is a fully SIP-compliant handset certified for use with a variety of IP PBXes, including BroadSoft (News - Alert), Asterisk, and Metaswitch platforms. It too has a seven-inch touch screen but like the Glass, all functions from dialing through transfer are controlled through the touch screen; there are no physical keys. Panasonic's home screen of dial pad plus navigation buttons is different from the traditional Android "skin," so the company says its phone uses an "open source" operating system rather than being able to use the phrase Android up front. However, once you get past the opening screen, the look and feel screams "Android."

One of the niftier features Panasonic demoed at IT EXPO East was the ability for the UT670 to monitor and control up to 16 Panasonic network security cameras. The phone can display live security video and you can use the touch screen on the phone to instruct a camera to turn and. List price on the Panasonic is $499, which is about $100 less than the current list on the larger-screen Glass. 

Comparing both phones against Glass almost seems unbalanced.   The Glass phone has an 8.9 inch color display and has separate dedicated processors handling the applications and VoIP telephony.   Glass' extra visual real estate means it takes up more physical space on the desktop; this may not be a problem for the C-level executive, but someone working in a more cramped environment might get annoyed.   Meanwhile, you can simply drop the ESI or Panasonic phones in place of an existing analog or IP handset for about the same physical footprint.

One thing is certain; other manufacturers will be bringing Android to their desktop phones.  The ability to program phones via Javascript gives VARs, resellers, and businesses the ability to more deeply customize applications for general and vertical markets.