Can do what landlines couldn't: change with the times.

The Ooma Telo VoIP phone system was created to let you get rid of your landline without giving up all of the advantages of a landline. Service is certainly cheaper than a mobile phone - calls in the US are basically free. That mobile black hole in your house doesn’t bother it. Even if your mobile phone works fine, it never hurts to have a redundant way to reach the outside world, just in case.

And the Ooma Telo still does all that, if you need it. But the more people learned to live without landlines, the better mobile coverage got, the less reason there was for it to exist. Would the Telo phone follow the same decline as the telephone? Was Ooma doomed?

Not necessarily. Because unlike traditional phones, which did only one thing, the Telo is adaptable. And Ooma’s been adapting its ass off to the keep the Telo relevant.

First there’s the Ooma Premier service. A $10 monthly subscription (not included) gives you things like three-way calling, a second line, call forwarding to your mobile phone, free calls to Canada, blocking anonymous and blacklisted calls, and a long menu of other little stuff.

But as Ooma just announced at CES this week, if you have Nest in your house, Ooma Premier can talk to it in all kinds of potentially helpful ways. Ooma Nest can see when you leave your house and forward your calls while you’re gone. If your kid doesn’t get home from school on time, it can call you. When your Nest alarm goes off and you’re far away from home, you can use Ooma to call your home 911 service from your mobile phone. Here’s a video about it, if that helps.

Is any of this “game-changing”? No.

But it does mean that Ooma’s still coming up with new ways to take advantage of the Telo’s position at the junction of phone and Internet. This isn’t some unloved orphan product that the manufacturer has dumped down the memory hole. Maybe this is as far as Ooma can take the Telo, or maybe they’re working on something that’ll blow our freaking minds, maaaan. Maybe it’s just not something you have any use for. But unlike some of the crap we sell, it’s a safe bet the Telo isn’t going to be getting less useful.