Senao SI-7800H WiFi SIP phone Review

In principle, the Senao SI 7800 is a SIP capable WiFi terminal, similar in size and design to mobile phone, but without the cell phone capabilities. It can be used at WLAN hot spots which have public access to the internet (not to many at the moment).

I received this sample from a colleague who is responsible for testing terminals at o­ne of the Polish mobile operators (I work there too).


I’ve just received the latest firmware and installed in the phone (the previous firmware terrible, making this device almost useless). Just to mention, both of them (the previous and the current firmware) seem to be pre-commercial versions, but the latter o­ne (0.03.0004 dated o­n 2004.10.07) is much more stable and contains fixes for most of the bugs from the previous version (0.01.004).

General information

As mentioned above, this device at first sight could be mistaken for an ordinary cell phone. It's a similar size, has a display with coverage bar (showing the WiFi strength), battery status, function keys, phone keyboard, etc. A built-in menu allows setting of all the required configuration, starting with the Wireless LAN (it has “site survey” function which helps find and connect to the proper WLAN SID), IP settings (DHCP/static IP configuration) and SIP settings (username, password, registrar, register time interval, proxy, outbound proxy, codec order). The phone has a built-in phone book, provides the owner with the call history (dialed, received and missed calls) and general phone settings (ringer volume and melody, vibrator and speaker volume). But… if you don’t want to fiddle with the menu settings, you can use… the web management interface! Yes, that’s right, this small device has built-in web server with admin pages via which you can do the same operations (and much more) as via the phone menu but with the added comfort of your PC screen and keyboard (you can also backup the phonebook here). I used this method to upgrade the firmware. To do this you don’t need to have any special cables to connect it to the PC but you will need to have the Senao FTP account, from which phone will automatically fetch the firmware image (the o­nly thing you have to do is to set up the FTP account parameters: userid, password, address, path and image filename). In my case I just ran a simple FTP server o­n my PC and did the operation locally. The whole upgrade took just a few minutes and was performed without any problems. As a reward I got a phone with stable and useable software: it doesn’t hang anymore (at least not so often), it stopped losing its' SIP configuration (outbound proxy address) after every power restart, the “*” character become available (before it was impossible to input it from the keyboard, required for instance for dialing extensions in FWD), new messaging features (sending and receiving text messages) become available in the menu (I haven’t the opportunity to test this yet) and a few other minor bugs were corrected.

>Test environment

The phone was used mostly at my home where I have a WiFi AP/internet router (D-LINK DI-614+) connected to my cable modem and there to my internet provider. Due to the limitations of my uplink (which is 96 kbit/s), I decided to use the G.729 codec. The phone also supports G.711u/a and G.726 (16/24/32/40).

I also used it at a few public hot spots. In general, wherever the access to the internet was free, the phone was working; but in commercial hot-spots it was impossible to use it (not possible to log-in) To make it work, every time I changed Access Point, I needed to re-scan the site and reconfigure the WLAN settings. At this firmware stage, automatic WLAN roaming is not working.

For my tests I configured it to work with my FWD account. I tried to configure it also with wipphone and dialpad but wasn’t successful (in the case of wipphone, I suspect they recognize the type of terminal and they o­nly support certain types of terminals: X-TEN softphone and few proprietory ATA's). The o­ne disadvantage I noticed while using the phone was that it supports o­ne SIP profile o­nly. It would be nice if it had the ability to store and switch between a few service (SIP) profiles or even to handle a few independent “voip lines” individually. At the moment, if you want to switch between your VoIP accounts, you have to enter the settings manually (via the phone menu or web page) every time.

In use

In principle it works! o­ne strange thing I noticed is that it answers calls (i.e. processes the initial invite message) very slowly - it usually takes a couple of seconds whereas calls in the opposite direction are established almost immediately.

The battery life could be also improved - it is still far behind the cellular phone. In practice it is necessary to charge it every second day, even if it's o­nly in stand-by mode (no call)s)

Voice quality is quite good, especially when you consider that I was using a low bandwidth G.729 codec.

Conclusions

Would I recommend it? For every day use I think it's still better to use a standard phone set (wireless or fixed) connected to VoIP via an ATA adapter (like a Sipura SPA 1000/2000/3000). They are simply more mature, with better power performance. I found it useful when I took it with me to USA; I have free WLAN access at the hotel so was able to stay in touch with my relatives at home for free :-)

I think a more interesting device would be a dual mode mobile phone with cell phone (e.g. GSM) capability and supplementary VoIP/WiFi support.

Pietrucha

Added:  Monday, January 10, 2005
Reviewer:  pietrucha
Score:
hits: 34595
Language: eng

  

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Posted by Anaerin on Jul 30, 2006 - 12:00 AM Your rating: A quick question (or three) on this item... What's the availability and where can I get it from? What's the charger like? Is it a charging station (Like cordless PSTN phones) or is it a plug-in style (Like cellphones)? Does it support WPA? All the ones I've seen support WEP, but not WPA, which makes it next to useless on my 802.11b/g network, as I use WPA-AES to secure the network. Thanks.

Posted by wirelessab on Apr 07, 2005 - 02:33 PM Your rating: Thanks for the review. I wonder have you used the Zyxel 2000W phone? Is it better or worse than the Zyxel 2000W?