Right now I can only speak to the WIP300 but
I've been evaluating it for about a week now and really I have to say
I'm fairly pleased. It works it works //well// but that's not to say
it's perfect.
- Physically the phone feels very light and cheap, that if you were
to drop it that it might not survive very many of them. The buttons
feel more
like a toy than anything else but once you get beyond that it works.
- Address book storage is ok the interface from the phone is fairly
standard for what you would see in a cell phone and adding entries
isn't really
all that horrid of a task. You can also add entries via the web
interface which does make for an easier way to add several entries
but the lack of
anything resembling a 'sync' function could be considered bothersome.
- Call quality, so far so good however, I do believe the unit has a
bit of an over touchy MIC.. the quality is clear but but it seems to
pick up background
noise and white noise pretty good. That's not to say that it will
drown out your voice but you will hear the background if your in a
server or climate controlled room.
- The CPU on the phone does appear to be a bit underpowered. Two
devices right next to each-other one a PC soft-phone and one the WIP
300 using the 'qualify' feature
in asterisk you can clearly see a different in latency and how long
it takes for the wip300 to process some sip transactions. This
doesn't effect call quality but it is something
worth noting if I'm taking the time to write this out.
- Firmware: when you get the phone if it's running anything < 1.0.9
upgrade to the latest from linksys, there are a slew of bugs that
existing the factory shipping version that will
likely make you think you really got cheated if you don't upgrade the
firmware. Although make a note of the earlier thread upgrading has
some bugs too, and don't try it form a mac.
- I haven't tried the email function, as lack of intelligent keying
(adaptive text for word completion) to me makes this a worthless
feature.
- Wireless, actually after changing to the latest version I've been
fairly happy with the range coverage and life of the unit. You can
load in multiple profiles for which AP
you are talking to and the phone will register with that profile.
You can associate different AP's with different SIP accounts which
could be handy for traveling offices. The
documentation doesn't mention it but you can create a profile that's
a wild-card which will cause the phone to register to any open AP it
finds. This I've found works fairly
well as well as I can go from the east side to the west side of the
building and the unit will switch AP's without much trouble, but do
expect a dropped call in the process.
If you have a mesh setup then the drop shouldn't happen but that's
another story all together.
I haven't played with the various encryption options so far as I've
only been evaluating based on open access points. My thought is that
likely the encryption may show
more with the CPU load depending on how the unit manages this with
it's chip set but even at that I don't think it will cause any red
alarms. I could be wrong though.
Last thing, one neat thing about the wip300 if you are adventurous is
the fact that the firmware is under GPL... so if you really felt like
it you could probably change the behavior of
the phone.
Anyway sorry for the long message but I felt like chiming in on
this. All in all I don't think it's a horrible phone I do however
think it's over priced for what it is but not enough demand on
this type of device is always going to keep the price up in the air.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bryan Laird, Sr. Manager CM Operations
-+-
Cablemodems are the gateway to the Internet.
The Internet is a gateway to some things that are better left un-seen.
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com --
asterisk-users mailing list
To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
