Hitachi Cable Wireless IP3000 Review
Wi/Fi enabled 802.11b cordless phone, slightly larger than contemporary mobiles, a smaller and cheaper brother to the Wireless IP5000. The unit weighs in with a retail price of between £150 to £180 plus VAT.
In the box.
Handset,
Battery,
Charger,
Mains cable,
USB cable (sometimes listed as an extra)
Installation
Fit the battery into the back of the phone, plug the USB lead into the USB socket, under the little rubber cover; and find it needs a driver. To the USB lead into the USB socket on the charger; and find it does not charge either. Not a great start.
Plug the mains lead into the USB socket on the charger, drop the phone into the socket and the little red tell-tale lights up, hooray!
w do I get in to set it up?
At the bottom of the screen display is a helpful heading pointing to a soft button marked L saying 'menu'. Poke that and scroll down and choose the entry marked network to find three helpful utilities: scan, ping, register. So no go there, we'll try of the setup option instead. This also proved unhelpful.
Some half-hour scrabbling on the Internet yields two manuals: a 50 page admin manual and 178 page user manual.
The admin manual directs you to select the 'Lock' option from the set up list for configuration. From there it is pretty straight forward, unless you have fat thumbs like mine. Instead, we look for the Internet setup page.
Page 41 of the admin manual explains how to get there (ip address:8080), not the most intuitive of selections, which pretty well sums up the rest of the set-up page and the manual. The later explains over the next seven pages, how to enter your name and stops, which is a pity because there are hundreds of settings to play with.
In Use
Once you have completed the usual setup rituals and start reading the much weightier user manual, you find this little thing really does the lot, SMS, multiple presence, 200 number memory. You do need to revise the manual thoroughly as the phone does not give a lot of help in using them.
Performance wise. It works well with Asterisk, with the possible exception of voice mail indications.
The volumes have to be set to maximum, as from the apologetic little chirrups of the ringer tones to the noise out of the ear piece this is not a loud instrument. But sound is crystal clear right up to the edge of the network.
Watching the little signal display suggests that switching between access points could be better, not looking for the next until the last one is exhausted (undoubtedly a setting amongst the mirade of undocumented settings in the web configuration), but in actual use switching is close to instant- it cheeps quietly in your ear and switches.
Battery life is about 2 days and recharging needs about 4 hours- Quite adequate for daily use and recharge.
About that USB Cable
Spend long enough searching on the Internet and you may find the call manager software (tip it is a download for the WIP5000). This allows you to create and edit the phone's address book off-line.
Overall Impression
A fine performing and fully featured wireless SIP phone, perfect for a private network. (Lack of Internet authorisation prevents its use with public Wi/Fi).
Less than intuitive feature usage, poor/incomplete documentation is an obstacle to getting the best from it and spoil the show.
Low volumes may prove a limitation in noisy environments.
Added: Sunday, July 23, 2006
Reviewer: Ray Gower
Score:
hits: 13185
Language: eng
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