Can AT&T make phoning fun again?

Alan Weinkrantz, president of Weinkrantz PR and an independent blogger, has been following AT&T’s U-Verse service since it was made available to his hometown of San Antonio, also AT&T”s headquarters. He signed up for AT&T’s digital home phone service when it became available last month and is now one of the first to trial HomeManager.

Weinkrantz has found the Yellowpages functionality on HomeManager to be faster and easier to use than the same experience on U-Verse TV. Consumer can also do email from the landline using a stylus for tapping, however, Weinkrantz said the experience is clunky and less elegant than on the iPhone.

“The lesson here is that there is no one device or communications platform that can be all things to all consumers,” Weinkrantz said on his blog. “The other lesson is that slowly but surely AT&T is helping me build out a small-scale enterprise network in my home with service options that can be deployed on a variety of hardware platforms. At the end of the day, it can be my TV, my PC, my wireless device, or now my Frame.”

The question is if consumers want a device that can be all things digital. Weinkrantz compared the phone to an enterprise Cisco, Nortel or Avaya office IP phone, but one that also doubles as a digital picture frame. He described HomeManager as having the look and feel of a scaled down tablet PC, but Yankee Group analyst Steve Hilton pointed out that it is also the equivalent of an exceedingly low-functionality PC that hangs on the wall.

“Let’s say I need a recipe because I’m making a dinner for my wife’s birthday; you just pop open your laptop and put it right there on the counter next to you,” Hilton said. “If I’m a young, single, hip guy, and I want to check email, I don’t want to do it in the middle of a room where my roommates are hanging out. That’s just goofy.”