Method and apparatus for cordless phone and other telecommunications services

A system for distributing a plurality of network services that include a telephone service and an instant messaging service, MI, comprising: a base station (100) comprising a processor configured to execute a device control software (20), wherein the device control software comprises a software application scheme (200) configured to allow communications between a plurality of user devices and one or more network services (19), wherein said base station (100) further comprises: one or more voice codecs configured to translate incoming and outgoing voice streams between different digital encoding formats; and a memory storage configured to store the recorded voice, download application data and specific content of the features and services controlled by said one or more network services (14); wherein said plurality of user devices (102) are each adapted for bidirectional communication with the base station (100), at least some of the user devices including a telephone handset (104) adapted to make voice calls to people selected from a list of the user's IM friends; a gateway (304) configured to access said one or more network services (14) in response to a request from one of the plurality of user devices, the gateway being configured to receive a response from one or more network services and being adapted to format the response for presentation by the user device; an application distribution engine (302) configured to manage and plan the distribution of network services to each user device of the plurality of user devices; and wherein said software application scheme (200) comprises; a wrapper configured to manage communications and component operations, a display manager (204) configured to manage the display of information on the user device and navigation across multiple screens, wherein the display administrator is configured to manage the flow of display elements from other components of the software application scheme to any user device of said plurality of user devices; a download and cache manager (208) to manage the download and storage of large data sets, in which the download and cache manager is configured to manage the download of large data sets to the base station memory and then to one or more user devices as required, in which when the base station and the user device are unable to store a set of data, the download and cache manager is configured to return a negative acknowledgment to a data storage request; an address book administrator (206) configured to provide integration with network-based address book storage data structures and to provide a window within a network-based storage by downloading subsets of particular data through the download manager and cache, and wherein the address book administrator is configured to communicate with the display administrator to provide a user interface to the user device; and a call information manager (210) configured to manage call processing as configured by a user and to combine call handling rules with a current time and user presence information to route a particular call.