Review of the UTStarcom F1000, Vonage's first WiFi phone
posted Apr 15th 2005 12:40PM
It's been almost a year and a half since we heard the first rumblings about this, but we finally got to spend a few days with the UTStarcom F1000, Vonage's long-awaited WiFi phone. Is it everything we were waiting for? Well, not exactly, but as a proof-of-concept we definitely like where they're going with this. Read on for our impressions.
Design
First off, the handset itself has all the cutting edge styling of a late Nineties Nokia and if you're the type
that's embarrassed to pull anything but the latest Sony Ericsson or Motorola out of your pocket (it's ok to fess to
this!), you might feel a little "weird" using the UTStarcom F1000 in public. Otherwise, the phone will remind you of a
vintage cellphone in more ways than one—if the design doesn't do it, perhaps the small, grayscale LCD or old school
interface will do the trick.
[Note: Vonage made it very clear to us before they sent us the handset that the F1000 is in beta, so keep that in mind
as you read this.]
Getting connected
Anyway, once you have the phone turned on, you have to connect to a wireless access point before you can start
making any phone calls (obviously). This can be a little difficult to figure out without actually reading the
instructions (as we'll explain in a moment). To make that initial connection you just set the phone to Auto Scan (why
it's not in that mode by default isn't clear), and the F1000 automatically connects to the nearest open access point.
If the access point is encrypted you have to enter your WEP Key, which, is tons of fun to do with a phone keypad, trust
us. If you're at a hotel or Starbucks or someplace that requires you to enter a password or otherwise log-in via a
webpage, you're out of luck; the F1000 just won't work.
Unfortunately, we decided to just give this whole process a shot right out of the box without reading the instructions
first (instructions what?). After more than a couple failed attempts to connect we were able to get it going,
but what caused us all this grief is a classic case of poor interface design. It's not unreasonable to have to flip
through a few menus to connect to an access point, but when you fire up the F1000 you are presented with two options:
"Menu" and "Search", and it's that "Search" option that's so confusing. When we first fired up the phone we instantly
selected the "Search" option. The phone scanned and found our wireless access point, along with several others, but
actually trying to connect this way was problematic. We scrolled down the list of detected access points until we found
the one we wanted, clicked "Save", entered our WEP key, clicked "OK", and then...we were bounced right back to the list
of access points. So we clicked the one we wanted again. Fortunately this time the WEP Key was already in there, but
then hitting "Save" brought us back to that list of access points again. The smart thing would be to have you simply
connect, right? Yeah, we thought that, too. Instead, we exit out of the AP selection menu, and are confronted with the
main screen, which says that the F1000 is trying to connect...to the wrong AP! Finally we switched off the phone and
switched it on again, and this time we were able to connect to the correct AP with no trouble. Beta blues, no
doubt.
Frustratingly, we encountered this same problem again when we wanted to switch the phone from one access point (it had
connected to our neighbor's open AP) to another. We went through the exact same process, but this time we followed the
instructions and already had the phone set to Auto-Scan. We were able to finally get things rolling again, but there's
no way the average person is going to want to deal with jumping through these kinds of hoops.
Call quality
Once you're connected, it's pretty much like using a regular cellphone, which means that voice quality is acceptable (but not amazing). On occasion the sound quality was absolutely horrible, and was so bad that we could barely understand anything that the person we were speaking to was saying (though oddly enough every time this happened the person we were chatting with would say that everything sounded fine on their end). We thought perhaps it was a bandwidth problem on our sude, so we did some side-by-side comparison tests using a regular Vonage line. The calls on the regular Vonage line sounded considerably better, and even people who didn't complain about the quality when using the F1000 could tell the difference between the two.
Battery life
This was where we were pleasantly surprised. Vonage had hinted back in January that the F1000 would only have about three hours of talk time, but in our tests we were able to get almost six hours of talk time before the battery completely died on us. Part of that may have had to do with the phone's proximity to our wireless access point during the bulk of those hours, but regardless, the F1000 kept on going far longer than we expected.
Conclusion
So what's the verdict? Obviously we're not in love with the F1000, but for a first-generation product (which, even
though there are other WiFi phones, this essentially is) we're actually not displeased. Yes, the voice quality varied
and it wasn't always a snap to get connected, but we were able to successfully make and receive phone calls both here
at Engadget HQ and while we were out and about in Manhattan, which is exactly what we wanted it to do.
It's important to keep in mind is that the F1000 isn't meant to replace your cellphone, and Vonage doesn't even come
close to suggesting that anyone would want to carry around one of these instead of their regular cellphone. And while
it's true that the average person probably won't see the point in owning a WiFi phone, anyone who travels a
considerable amount, especially overseas, is probably going to want some sort of Voice over WiFi capability, whether it
comes in the form of standalone handset like the F1000 or integrated into a regular smartphone or PDA phone. The
prospect of being able to be make incredibly cheap phone calls from a hotspot anywhere in the world is pretty
tantalizing (that's a word we hardly ever use around here), and we really wish we'd been able to schedule a trip out of
the country to really test this thing out. We're supposed to send the F1000 back to Vonage next week, but we'll try and
see if we can borrow it again next time we're out of town for a followup.
Like we said earlier, technically the F1000 is still in beta, but unless Vonage can improve the voice quality and make
the user experience a bit less frustrating, they're going to have trouble getting anyone but the most hardcore business
travelers and globetrotters to buy this thing.
Side-by-side with the Treo 650
Vonage isn't taking any chances.
Is the charger 110v or 220v? Theoretically this should work in a Hotel with a wired connection provided you bring your own wireless AP and get past the webpage proxy with your laptop right (i.e. paying the fee, accepting their T&C, etc.)? Vonage/Linksys annoys me by shipping their routers with only 110v. I travel overseas often and it's a PITA.
I was an early vonage user, and gto really frustrated with call quality and customer service...the echo, delay and distortion finally had be give up and go back to land line. shame too; features and price are great.
has the qualtiy and service improved generally?
I'm wondering how does this phone fare against ZyXEL's P2000W Wi-Fi phone.
This could be a device ahead of its time. If muni Wi-Fi/WiMAX ever takes off on a truly national (or international) level, phones like this might become fairly popular. They won't help you on the backroads, of course, which will keep the major wireless carriers in business, but people who rarely ever leave a Wi-Fi-enabled city might find Vonage's unlimited calling for $25/mo. a lot more appealing for mobile phone use than Verizon, Cingular or Sprint.
Of course, the phones will have to get a little more stylish first, but there you go...
jon,
I've been with Vonage for a long time myself, and yes, the service and quality of calls has done nothing but increase as the years go by.
Right now, I have zero complaints with their service. No echoes, no dropped calls, great web interface and support.
I'd give them a try again. They sell new routers now instead of the cisco one i have (how geeky was that?) that look more like appliances for the home.
We've had vonage for almost a year & love it. A cell phone is worse than vonage yet we shell out quite a bit a month for that luxury.
We bought it for the $27 a month unlimited everything. Save a ton off qwest local service plus add on's and at&t unlimited long distance.
I run a cable modem to a wireless router. The vonage is plugged in the router along with a pc & a wireless laptop & tivo box also share the bandwidth. Works perfect! Saves me $40+ a month. We just moved & I didn't have to have qwest come out & change anything or hook up anything, just unplugged qwest from the house & plugged vonage into the wall. Instant phone through out the home, same phone number. No install charges.
realy cool concept, cant wait till it gets all the kinks out and out of beta!, and its price tag aint all that high, so this is awesome, but some bluetooth implementation would be awesome
What I really need is one that's not locked to a service so that I can use several of them at home with my local asterisk PBX.
I'm sure any small business would be interested in the same thing.
HOW MUCH!!!!!!!
damn missing link ..
Ssavitzky there are many vendors that make wifi phones that are not vendor locked. Cisco has a nice one. this page has a link to ALL of them
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-VOIP+Phones
-b
Benny -- thanks. I already knew about that page, though; most of the existing WiFi phones are far too expensive (not to mention bulky and ugly).
When they get down to $100 I'll consider buying one; more than that and I'm better off wired. When they get down to $50 I'll think about replacing most of the phones in my house.
This old article indicates it would hit the 100 mark, http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3478
A bake-off of recently available WiFi handsets seems to be in order...
The new UTStarcom F1000 is a step in the right direction for wifi phones. The technology is continually maturing and the F1000 does have some improvements over the original ZyXEL wifon, i.e. talktime and SSID character length acceptance. Thanks to the folks at Engadget for taking time to test and review this phone.
I think this is a great concept for college kids. I know for me, I'll be using it to save my on cell minutes. I have WiFi in my dorm, WiFi on most of campus and in every building, WiFi when I go home. Although I wonder how it will work with your existing Vonage plan, it says "additional" phone, does this mean in addition to your Adapter, without a monthly cost? I'll use my parents plan! Hey, they're not using it during the day, and are rarely on the phone at night!
I have a question, and then a comment.
Can this thing dial any full sip address, such as john@doe.com, or just the crippled version where it dials a numeric "user name" and assumes that the domain is the proxy server it's connected to? This is a huge issue with SIP telephony that product specs never seem to point out. SIP phones that allow you to dial any SIP address can allow users to effectively grandfather out PSTN phones.
The comment is that WiMax will go beyond just being "handy"; it will take over the mobile phone network concept. When everyone has high-speed broadband internet devices with unlimited data plans for like 50-60$/mo. and they can use those devices for unlimited "free" telephony, wimax agents are going to have reason to make towers just as prolific as mobile phone towers. Eventually, all "cell phones" will just be standards compliant SIP Wimax devices. That's my prediction. Give it 5-7 more years.
Ahh..I figured it all out. It doesn't need to be able to dial SIP address necessarily. It just needs ENUM support with e164.arpa, and possibly e154.org and such. ENUM is the future.
When they get cheap enough, who cares about network lock? Replace the cordless phone in your house with a phone you can use at home or in any hotspot. If you work at home, and in the city, but not in between (in transit), this gizmo could save you a lot of money. Hurry up and develop it, geeks!
I'm still going to wait for a wifi voip phone that can run scripts to punch through public access points that require either authentication or acceptance of terms and conditions. I'm really surprised no existing manufacturer has addressed this issue either by building in a small browser or by allowing the phone to run scripts. Maybe the WIP-2, which is supposed to run Linux, will allow this.