If you call my desk at work, this is the phone that will ring:

Just announced today at WinHEC, it's one of a whole line of products from the Unified Communications devices team.  It's plugged into my PC's USB jack and that's it.  Look closely at the photo and you'll probably ask the obvious question: so how do I dial phone numbers if there's no dial pad? 

I know, I know, you want me to reply "with SR", although the fact is that there is no SR built into the phone. Instead, it's designed to work with Office Communications Server (or OCS, which you can now download in beta) so dialing somebody at work is as simple as selecting their name from the address book (and yes, I can do that hands-free using Windows Speech Recognition).

For people like me who already have a nice headset, this unified communications stuff with OCS is even easier than having one of these devices. Most of the time I don't bother using the desktop phone -- I just use my headset.  The two are basically identical as far as OCS is concerned.  One nice bonus of the headset, though, is that if I carry it with me, I can answer and make phonecalls from whereever I am (home, on the road, at work).  The other day I even made a phonecall from my TabletPC's built-in microphone and it worked just fine.

Use one of these things for a while and you'll start to wonder why people bother with a desktop phone at all.  In fact, I predict that in a few years most people will just have a headset and the concept of a desktop phone will seem as quaint as one of those old rotary dials.