Gizmodo
Yet another Skype VoIP phone from the bowels of Computex over in the balmy capital of Taiwan, Taipei. This BCM WiFi phone has 802.11 b/g, miniUSB, a 240x320 screen and a built in media player. More importantly, it supports Skype, SIP, MSN Talk and MSN Messenger.
This phone, unlike the Netgear Skype WiFi phone, supports WEP and WPA, something many people have been complaining about. If a WiFi Phone does NOT support WEP and WPA, you'll have to leave your home WiFi unprotected, plus, you can't take this to say, a Starbucks, where you have to authenticate to use the WiFi.
This phone supports WEP and WPA, but we're not sure if it has a web browser in order to go through the process of paying for WiFi and accessing it at Starbucks. The Netgear phone supports WEP and WPA but there's no way to get online at a Starbucks when it uses the transparent proxy to redirect you to a sign-in page when you try to access their WiFi. The WLAN800 does support "major hotspot companies such as T-Mobile", so it's possible.
The WLAN800 will be available from BCM in July.
PC-less VoIP Wi-Fi phone [Reg Hardware]
Comments
The price on this better be low. It'd pay $150 but no more for it. I wonder what the target audience is for a product like this. If it's regular people then they have to find a way to convince people that it's more than just a home cordless phone for the internet.
$150 is a good price. The Netgear one is $249, so maybe one of the cheap Chinese manufacturers can undercut them.
This would be great for people with an EVDO router in the trunk of their car.
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