Kyocera and Boingo teaming up on WiFi cellphones
posted Mar 15th 2005 2:26AM
Kyocera has been sort of surprisingly in effect at
CTIA this year, what with the
unveiling of their unexpected partnership with Alienware
and all (not to mention the fact that they were showing off their cutester Japan-only A1403K cellphone), but the
potentially more interesting news is that they're going to work with Boingo Wireless to develop a line of 3G cellphones
with built-in WiFi (that would seamlessly connect up to Boingo's WiFi network, of course). No specifics on when we
might expect to see any of these next-gen phones—it could be a loooooong time—and it's not really clear Kyocera really
needed to team up with Boingo for this one. We're betting they could probably figure out how to get WiFi into their
phones on their own.
[Via Wi-Fi Networking News]
Of the 6100 exhibitors at CeBIT this year in Hannover, Germany I spoke with 8 or 10 companies working on dual-mode wifi/cellular phones. Kyocera engineers took part in the VoIP Vendor Summit at CeBIT, but did not have a booth.
The biggest technical hurdle for high-volume wifi phone deployment is still the chipset/DSP/wifi-radio integration. It is an ongoing development at the moment which will solve the power consumption issues and bring MPEG processing on board.
With these improvements, the dual-mode wifi phone will offer more robust features, but with a price. The standard wifi-only handset is still hovering around US$200, however several manufacturers at CeBIT were promoting a $150 phone with very nice firmware. The camera option added about $100, and provided very nice SIP/Video calling.
The coolest product launched at CeBIT(aside from the $20 cigarette lighter MP3 players) was the WiFi SIP/Video Phone. It is a full-featured open standards IP/PBX desk phone with integrated camera and 7-inch touch-sensitive flat panel display.
-- Mirian