The Cisco CIUS

So I have had one of these little tablets for awhile now as it was a spare/demo that we were not using anymore.  I know Cisco discontinued this tablet since it was essentially a piece of crap that an iPad superseded in every way possible.  I had some time on my hands yesterday and wanted to register this thing to our CUCM 11 lab.  I ended up getting it registered and noticed that the Android version on it is dirt old, 2.2.2 old. 

One thing led to another and I realized that thing had Jabber on it but it was called "Chat" or something of the sort without the Jabber name.  Now the CIUS already comes with a built in call control system where you can easily dial with the touch of a button but I wanted to use Jabber since that is how things are done these days when using soft clients and tablets.  I went into the "Chat" client and tried to log in and kept getting a "Invalid username/password".  Ok, not possible, I just reset the password to something I couldn't fat finger and tried a few more times and got the same message.

At this point, I'm getting confused as to how this could be possible.  I put in the username@IP and nada.  It just keeps giving me that error.  After some research online, I found out that Jabber "Chat" program demands a URI of username@domain, in this case user@GTWON.TFE.COM (my special little domain inside the lab).  I hit login and bam, it worked...  Why?  Why did I "HAVE" to put that in there versus the IP which works fine on regular Jabber clients on windows and iPads?

So I was excited, I could make phone calls and chat with my other lab jabber clients and see their presence.  I went back into the call screen and noticed the users were not populating presence status yet the chat client was.  This can't be right, the subscribe CSS is correct and everything is allowed to pass through by default.  I still haven't figured this one out yet.

So leaving that behind, I went back into the "Chat" client and realized that this is all the application could really do, chat.  This tablet was made in an era where the call control and chat were separate still.  I tried to upgrade the application and couldn't.  I figured Google Play store might have been out of date, and it was.  I logged back in after the updates and couldn't find the "Cisco Jabber" application on the store front.  Again, I was like huh?

At this point I was confused but did some more reading and found out that the processor is intel based and not ARM based, not sure if that makes a difference, but still.  So no new Jabber client can be installed on this piece of garbage.  I tried to find out how to update the OS on the CIUS, again, nothing.  4.0 was promised as a free update for the CIUS but it never came to light since the tablet as dumped years ago. 

So there you have it, a tablet that is both outdated and worthless other than for lab use.  I wanted to try the camera out but don't have another video or telepresence device hooked up to the lab just yet.  Other than for looks, this tablet will sit there as a pure lab phone since I can do nothing with it for the time being. 

For those of you wondering how to register the CIUS, there is both a wireless and a 3g/wireless version.  The best way is to let it auto-register but you can also pick the right model based on what you have.  Also, do NOT use the wireless MAC to register, use the "Ethernet" MAC to register as the wireless one is not driving the system to CUCM apparently.  Not sure how that works but I found that out after some research too.  Well I hope this article on antiquated equipment gave you a chuckle.