Hitachi Cable Wireless IP 5000 Review
Overview
The WIP5000 is a wireless 802.11b SIP phone. I received this phone for testing and have been carrying it around and using it for about half a year. I only got a phone and a charger. As I did not buy this phone retail, I do not know if anything else normally comes in the box.
My primary use of this phone has been on an university campus, which has as good a WiFi coverage as one could possibly expect for a normal user. I have also taken the phone traveling to different places where wireless was unpredictable. The phone is set up to connect to my Asterisk server.
The Good
* - It does the basics: it registers with an Asterisk server and can dial and receive calls. Call quality is typically good.
* - I like the overall feel and design of the phone.
* - Basic phonebook functionality with speed dial numbers.
* - It has a builtin web server located on port 8080 that can be enabled or disabled. You can log in to the web server either as "user" or "admin" to get two completely different set of options. Logging in as user allows you to edit your phonebook online, which is much nicer than entering entries on the phone. Logging in as admin gives a whole range of options that include the ones available on the phone but also many more.
* - Multiple profiles can be easily created for connecting to different wireless networks.
* - The battery life is not great but ok for my sparse use of the phone. It survives the day without charging and I leave it on the charger overnight.
* - The phone was sometimes useful as a wireless network tool. It could scan and connect to networks and has a builtin ping tool.
* - It has a remote syslog feature which I found to be quite useful for debugging the phone's connection with my Asterisk box.
The Bad
* - My biggest problem with the phone: the phone often de-registers and does not re-register even when clearly in the presence of a strong network signal. It apparently does not automatically re-register after it loses a signal. Just walking around a building and roaming between access points usually causes the phone to be de-registered and hence unable to make or receive calls until a manual pushing of the register button.
* - Documentation for the phone was very difficult to find online and were not always the most helpful in understanding many of the options.
* - I have almost never been able to get the phone completely working on any public network. It lacks any authorization mechanism such as a web browser that so many public access points require. On some public networks, I can register but calls don't work properly (such as one-way audio). Admittedly, this is probably not entirely the fault of the phone.
* - The phone can only register with one server at a time.
* - The phone was set to synchronize with a NTP time server. However, when not connected to the network even for a brief period of time, I would often see the time displayed on the phone be off by 30 minutes either way.
* - The interface is often confusing and the documentation is poor.
* - Many of the admin options are not well documented and I had to spend much time fiddling with options.
Other Features
Features of the phone that I have not extensively used:
* - SIP presence (it did work with Asterisk's presence implementation)
* - SIP messaging (it did work with Asterisk's messaging implementation)
* - Alarm
Overall
I was hoping this phone could function as a replacement for a cell phone, and for this purpose, it has been a dismal experience. Even with universal WiFi in my daily routine, it has not been the most useful of phones. As I cannot count on it staying registered to the SIP server without manual intervention, it's not reliable for receiving calls. However, it has been useful for dialing out. Overall, I'm glad I was given this phone to test but I would not have been happy to have paid the over $300 price tag.
Added: Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Reviewer: Austin Che
Score:
hits: 4087
Language: eng
