Simple, Stand-Alone Internet Communication Devices?

ashitaka asks: "One month ago my father-in-law died leaving his wife to live alone for the first time in her life. She lives in a somewhat rural part of Japan, north of Tokyo, in an area with few neighbors. My wife is her only daughter and we live in Canada; her only son is an engineer for Fujitsu and spends many days on the road. We know she misses our kids and we try to get over to Japan as much as possible, however more than once every year or two is a stretch." What ashitaka is looking for is a simple device that can be used for video conferencing or instant messaging, that can be controlled with a remote and administered remotely. Assuming something like this doesn't exist, what would it take to bend a PC to this task?

"Videophone technologies up to now have required knowledge of computer operation and Instant Messaging software or having to go through the complexities of setting up the traditional video conference. Here we are talking about a 76-year old Japanese granny who has never (and probably never will) touch anything more complex than the phone or the TV remote.

I'm looking for a device which can be administered remotely, has 6-8 large 'quick-dial' buttons and an emergency button which will try to connect through a list of contacts if required. It shouldn't look like a computer but should support connecting to whatever IM clients would be appropriate. It would be nice if it could turn on the TV when a particular Universal remote button or buttons were pressed to save Obaachan an extra step but I'm not sure if current signaling standards for TVs would support that."

Crazy Talk. Free Software is Easy.

[twitter]

Freedom, not a lack of it is the answer to the problems you think you see.

If you don't believe me, feel free to respond to this post and tell me what the best development environment / language to write Linux desktop apps in is. Okay, now what's the best distribution? While we're at it, what's the best text editor? With that as a context, now tell me about UI guidelines and keychain standards.

I don't believe you because every useful program has been made to work with every distribution without a lot of effort. Gnome, KDE, X, etc all works together in a way non free junk never will. It's about freedom, not marketshare or "standards". When you define real standards for interoperability, the rest takes care of itself.

Others have pointed to dlink [dlink.com] and packet8 [packet8.net] phones. Because free software has swept up the embedded market, they both probably use some form of gnu/linux. If they don't now, they will later. All that's really needed for these devices to thrive is well regulated public networks. Without that, we will probably waste another decade while "broadband" and IM providers battle it out with incompatible crap.