Zyxel 200W Wireless SIP Phone Review

Zyxel 200W Wireless SIP VoIP Phone



What is it?

It’s a wireless SIP hardphone! Horray, let's hope it's one more of many to come.

Cost: about £120 to £180 inc VAT in the UK.

Expensive as a straight DECT replacement, but it does eliminate the cost of buying a SIP to PSTN adaptor (£90) and the added complexity of devices like the Sipura 3000.

Hopefully the price will come down when the competition comes on-line.

Where to buy one: lots of VoIP providers (voiptalk, pipecall etc) are selling this phone, along with the occasional seller on eBay. Shop around for the best prices.

First Impressions:

It has a similar build quality to a low to medium priced DECT phone; I had
no issues with the software or buttons. At about 150mm, it is slightly
taller than a modern mobile phone and about the same weight.

Set-up:

It is quick to configure from the box. It allows you to configure static or DHCP assigned IP addresses, scan for open broadcasted SSID APs, set-up a single WiFi connection (it supports WEP encryption), set an outbound proxy, set a single SIP proxy server, and set the outbound and inbound audio levels. It supports the G.711a&u and G.729 codecs.

Manuals & Support:

There is an 81 page manual and a 28 page quick start guide, the quick start was just a cut down of the main manual, but both were very clear, well written with lots of 'phone menu shots' so that you can visually see what should be happening on your phone. The firmware is available online, but the last update was about 8 months ago. The manufacture does response to emails.

The good points:

It has excellent audio quality, easy to configure menus, via the phone or the web interface. It doesn't have many features, but enough to be an effective phone. It is very simple to use, although the standby mode is annoying, after a couple of minutes it drops into this mode, and you have to press a button to wake it up before you dial your number. The phone directory is useful.

Not so good points:

It only supports one WiFi Access Point at a time
It can’t auto connect to an access point
It only supports one SIP Proxy at a time
It forces you to add an entry for an outbound proxy server
It doesn’t have a loudspeaking facility
It occasionally it un-registers from the proxy
Others have reported that it gets hot, and has a short battery life when in use, but I’ve not seen these problems myself.

Conclusion:

I’m 80% pleased with mine, the only annoying issue it that it keeps on un-registering, meaning that it can’t receive calls.

Overall score 7/10.

David

Added:  Saturday, February 26, 2005
Reviewer:  David Boyce
Score:
hits: 22092
Language: eng

  

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Posted by farzooma on Jun 18, 2006 - 11:46 PM Your rating: We also noticed this device needs a close range to your AP/wireless router.

Posted by iwasinnamuknow on Jul 16, 2005 - 05:07 PM Your rating: had the pleasure of getting a pair to play with at work on eval....one of them really did get hot...after 2 minutes talking on one handset you are sweating and uncomfortable :/

Posted by jamesbody2 on May 07, 2005 - 07:44 AM Your rating: IMHO most users will find that a standard DECT phone combined with an Analogue Telephone Adapter (Sipura or Grandstream) will give better results. Battery life and range are both limited with this model. Build quality is cheap/plasticky...