[md_27514]

As I promissed a while ago on a forum on WIP-330, I'm going to post my experience with Nokia e60 I had now for about a week. Nokia e60 is one of the first cell phones that promises to merge the cell phone with VOIP, it is a full feature GSM and 3G smartphone with the latest generation Symbian OS. It also have larger cousin e61 with full keyboard but same features.
The phone has a built in 802.11g version of wifi and SIP support, hence when wireless internet connection is available the phone call can be cheaply done over the internet. I only tested the phone with my asterisk, hence I cannot testify about different setup directly with a VOIP provider. This might be trickier, so if you do not have your own asterisk my advice would be to wait until NAT support improves (see below).

The current price of unlocked phone is about $320+shipping (www.plemix.com) which compares very favourably with mentioned WIP-330, since nokia has many more features.

As with any phone, there are good and bad points, but my overall impression is very positive. Here is the list of main points:

GOOD POINTS:

Excellent call quality both VOIP and GSM. The VOIP quality is on par with any Sipura which is the best compliment one can make

VOIP calls and standard wireless calls are treated as equals, you select which type of call is your default, but you can also make selection before each call.

Very good battery life - 2 days standby with wifi running (VOIP) and about 1 hour talk time. Wihout wifi on standby is about 5-6 days

Easy configuration for asterisk, worked on the first try

Support of WEP, WPA, WPA2, radius, EAP-PEAP, EAP-TLC. Here you can really see this is a bussiness phone - Nokia put a lot of efford to make it work in corporate enviroment

Phone keeps registration when associated with AP for days, no trouble

Full featured web browser supporting JAVA, https. This deals with the anoying web pages you sometimes see in hotels when you connect to their wifi.

Email client, Office suite, other installable applications

Applications run very quickly, however the phone boots a tad too long...

BAD POINTS

no NAT support - quoting Nokia: "STUN support is expected to become available during 2006, and TURN and ICE during 2007"

My experience with this: In reality the lack of NAT support only demonstrates itself for incomming calls. That is, you can always make outbound VOIP calls even hours after first registration, but incomming work only for first few minutes. What happen after it is that your router forgets the port mapping it originally made and hence phone does not ring. This is of course very anoying. Not at home, where you control the router - forwarding port 5060 to the phone fixes the problem permanently, but mainly outside where you cannot do this as you have no control over the router. Of course there isn't any issue if your phone and asterisk are on the same LAN. Hopefully, STUN support will fix this for good.

When wifi signal becomes temporary unavailable and then comes back, the phone does not always reregister with asterisk. Manual intervention required.

Each new AP needs a profile created, only then it can be used for asterisk. A bit anoying - meaning you have to do things manually if you come to a new internet cafe for example. Once profile is created the next association with the AP is without trouble.

UNKNOWNS

Did not have a chance to try roaming within same network consisting of multiple APs - will try it later

It is unclear how VPN works. The phone has built in VPN support but I was not able to try it. This would be a temporary workaround bypassing the NAT issue.

[PhoneBoy]

I think you might need a special server from Nokia to do VPN on the phones correctly. I don't think you can just configure it from the handset.

[simonxda]

I think the Linksys WIP330 is chasing up fast with new firmware and features. The release of the lastest firmware support MSN and Skype.
For the last few day I think I make the right choice. I never ever use the Wifi phone this much since I got the new firmware a few days ago.

Yes, I love me WIP330..

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/WIP330