Polycom RealPresence Trio 8800

Hi,

I agree with David - "I really want to like the Trio", but when we tried it some 8 months ago, during my previous employment it was far from complete. We were testing with software version 5.4.1.17597 so maybe some issues are corrected in never revisions? As a phone when it comes to voice and the design and price tag, the Trio is very good, but the issues we ran into were:

1. Picture-in-picture. While running a video meeting we got the active speaker displayed fullscreen, but we could not see our own picture being broadcasted. We heard this should be fixed in a future release - anyone knows?

2. Slow swapping of active speaker. Since the Trio is only displaying the active speaker we felt it took too long time for the video feed to change as a new speaker became "active". In some cases we had to talk for around 20-25 seconds before the video feed changed. It does not seem to be a setting in Lync or the Trio to make this switching more responsive / faster. (Since regular desktop clients have the gallery view this is not an issue for them.)

3. Video resolution. Trio to trio calls were great running in 1080p, but as soon as a client using VGA only the Trio started to send VGA only to all connected users. So as soon as one desktop user were in a meeting the experience was not nice.

4. Documentation. We had issues with the addressbook search, loading of root certificates and the login process which is really the Lync 2010 way of doing things. These features were not very well documented. We could not get the DHCP option 43 override to work which had been nice in our Cisco DHCP environment, but we heard others managed to make it work.

5. We could not get the Trio to play nice with a hosted Acano system, video was one-way only, and we could not resolve it after contacting both Acano and Polycom support.

With this said I still think the Trio can be a good device for some scenarios, but make sure you review and test it technically.

/mk