Josh Hendrickson
Right now, the business of video conferencing is booming, thanks to the global pandemic. Just ask Zoom, saw exponential growth, and ran into trouble along the way. Now the company wants to do more and partnered with DTEN to create a hardware-line designed to make video conferencing easy.
DTEN is already well-known in business settings for creating office hardware for video conferencing. Rather than worry about setting up a monitor, computer, cameras, and microphones, businesses could buy an all-in-one unit to cover everything.
But DTEN’s products often range in the thousands of dollars level, which is fine for a large company’s conference room, but unhelpful for everyone from home. Zoom and DTEN partnered together to offer something more affordable approachable.
The Zoom for Home DTEN ME is a 27-inch touch screen, with three built-in wide-angle cameras, and an 8-microphone array. You can use the touchscreen for whiteboard presentations, annotations, and more. It’s a bit like a smart display but focused on Zoom conferencing instead of YouTube and smart home control. The DTEN Me an all-in-one unit, with DTEN’s custom OS. It lacks any video connections, so it won’t double as a monitor.
Zoom and DTEN did aim the hardware at businesses, and it includes controls for your IT department to do all the hard setup remotely. But that doesn’t mean you can’t buy it if you work alone or in a company without a large IT department.
In either scenario, DTEN and Zoom designed an easy setup that mostly involves logging in with a Zoom account and providing details. If you don’t have IT Setup, it’s up to you to integrate your calendars. You don’ need a premium Zoom account to use the hardware either.
DTEN is taking pre-orders now, and the Zoom for Home DTEN ME will cost $599, which is more expensive than a Google Home Max but less expensive than most business-grade video conferencing hardware. That seems about right since the hardware itself falls between those two points.
DTEN expects to ship the hardware in August 2020.
