Earlier this month I got an announcement from Polycom about their soon to be released Communicator C100S speaker-phone product which is optimized for Skype. As a heavy user of Skype which is notoriously bad at echo and feedback suppression, I was very excited about the acoustic features of this new product and wanted to see if it really lived up to the specifications. Two weeks later, I got this review unit shown in the picture to the left and I immediately proceeded to try it out.
Included in the box were a CD, a Communicator C100S, a coupon for SkypeOut minutes, and a travel bag. The C100S has a base stand that was folded closed which enclosed a short 3 foot USB cable neatly wrapped around a cable manager which means the Communicator is highly portable. I do however wish Polycom had used an auto retracting USB cable but this is certainly better than most products I’ve seen that don’t do any kind of cable management. Once the base stand was open, I unwound the short USB cable and plugged it in to my Windows XP laptop.
Once plugged in, drivers were automatically detected and installed by Windows XP SP2 and I was able to use the C100S right off the bat. The only things missing without the Polycom Communicator software were the advanced audio processing and the API integration with Skype which permits the use of the front buttons on the C100S. Even so, the unit was already sounding better than any speaker/Mic combination that I’ve ever used.
