T58A - Video calls with Teams

[CyB0rg]

Hi,

It will be a longer one, but please do read on, as I will show you that it is possible, bar one (quite important) feature.

I am the latest "victim" of the T58A Teams Edition as well. I knew that it would not support video out of the box, but I have decided to purchase it anyway, given the newly added "hybrid mode" that was promising seamless switching between the SIP and Teams mode.

Total disappointment !

The SIP portion of hybrid mode is TOTALLY CASTRATED. Nothing really useful is there, just the ability to add accounts, usernames, passwords, that's pretty much it. Forget about NAT setting, RPORT, etc, etc. Nothing at all. You can't change anything that is useful, so it seems that this is another hastily added feature.

Given that, I have decided to factory reset my phone and install "normal" SIP firmware. Turns out, that after flashing it with the SIP firmware, you have to do the FR for the second time, as the Teams app was visible in the android apps section, but after firing it up it removed the android button bar from the bottom, so once you are in it, you can't get out - bar rebooting the phone.

After second factory reset, all was well - now it was a time to install the Teams.

Using local http server, along with setting the correct parameters, I've managed to install the Teams apk (from the 3rd party apk store site).

Now, for the user experience. Sadly, the underlying hardware is quite crappy, and does not cope very well with the non-optimised apk from Microsoft - it takes quite a lot to switch between the desktop and the app when it is running in the background.

And video ? It works ! Due to the lack of hardware oomph, the 1to1 video call is quite laggy at times, then it "catches up", but not very smooth. Surprisingly the Teams meeting with 14 participants, with 3 of them with video, was smoother than the 1:1 call !

Success ? ... almost.

It seems that the "side loaded" Teams apk does not trigger the notifications when someone rings you - rendering that pretty much useless in the real-life scenario. Every other notification (messages, missed calls, voicemail, mentions, etc etc) work as expected, just not the incoming calls !

Photo attached.

   

Now, I probably won't be coming back to "Teams" firmware, unless they decide to do the "full SIP" mode with just the Teams Audio app.

Question to Yealink - would it be possible to get the Teams APK that you have
installed in the Teams firmware ? That might be the best option, other than than it would have to be VP59, but that's waaaaay to expensive to consider in a SOHO scenario ...

Stay safe !
Cy