Wireless Wi-Fi SIP phone a new appliance from Senao
Senao SI-683H IP SIP Wireless Telephone is a light; slim, single piece design that can provide higher performance, lower power consumption, smaller footprint, and lower overall cost than other solutions in the market today. It is not a cell phone replacement but is a mobile Wi-Fi phone that can easily integrate with Trixbox (Asterisk) solution and Locustworld wireless Mesh technology. This review has been made based on 4 days of use.
Strengths: Good Sound, Compact, Good Battery Life, Solid Connection, Automatic wireless mesh login (after setup), web configuration, simple to operator, connects easily with Trixbox, and Locustworld wireless mesh. Colour screen with SIP text messaging, easy to operate, NAT traversing configuration, works up to a .5 mile away (open air no obstacles using mesh access point)
Weaknesses: No CSA or European standards only USA FCC, documentation was online; no MAC address on box; funky startup screen; Thin plastic case, Buttons are average size but sometimes needs different pressure points to work. URL location requires IP address (not verified), Language limitation to only English and a few Asian languages.
Summary: I’ve purchased this phone to use as a better option than using SIP on my mesh network using Trixbox. Using the new Senao phone though the connection does not drop and the quality of sound is good. Overall I pleased with the purchase and the ease of use. I wanted a Wi-Fi telephone that was not heavily featured and that I could use the power of Trixbox and Locustworld to provide any additional features and I got what I wanted!
Wants or Improvements: Design for Asian Market languages are English and various Asian languages, it would be great to have French and Spanish available for North American market; Standards for Canada and Europe would have been good; no open standard (the telephone can easily be upgraded it would be fun to have the source code to make this telephone really appealing since EnGenius Senao’s SI-683H is driven by a highly integrated System-on-a-Chip, a single chip especially designed for wireless VoIP handsets, enabling a complete phone design with very few external components. There is no walkie-talkie features; I figure that most of municipalities that run Wi-Fi mesh networks would want to provide a VoIP services for the city as well as the public. A walkie-talkie feature would be helpful; No Video feature I’ve seen X-ten video feature on SIP and would think with the colour screen that a simple video camera would have been great for this product like the Nokia N800. Also there was no integrated messaging you know with all the MSN, Google, Yahoo messaging, email etc that this telephone could handle a few more features. A web browser would be great on this phone. I believe this phone has Linux core I could be wrong, but I think they have enough capacity to give a few more features. May the list is too long and maybe the designer wanted to keep it simple, thinking about it, the reason I bought the phone was for it’s simplicity.
Other thoughts: The USB charging is easy, fast and convenient; however, the USB cable was not provided so I use the cradle option instead. It would be nice if for the $200+ that a storage case for protection was included. Since the size of this is a high as my Blackberry but only 1/3 the width. My colleague calls it a 90’s retro styling and my 15 year old son calls it a walking cinderblock. Pretty harsh comments but the device is very handy and fit into any pocket. The plastic casing on the phone is thin and I would hate to drop it.
Hot Spot: The biggest feature I found was that it can use via an open network or secured networks. This really allows it to be used in many places for convenience since most free public open networks require browser authentication (not verified) with wireless mesh you can authenticate on the MAC address this gave the telephone ability to automatically authenticate and hope nodes with ease. This makes the phone very usable at hotels, airports, coffee shops etc. Right now I’m using it basically as a phone to use around the house with ones own wireless mesh network. All of my networking gear is made up of parts from Senao and I am very fond of their products, but this one has a way to go to make it truly useful.
Locustworld Network: What blew me away was the Locustworld mesh gave the Senao SI-683H the ability to automatic roaming the mesh cloud. This was really cool but I read (Senao) that there is limit to how many nodes you can pass before it drops the call, I haven’t encountered this problem. I know that when I was 4 hopes out the Senao with Locustworld mesh and Trixbox was a good combination. Once setup the Senao automatically roams to the most suitable access point based on the electromagnetic wave strength from the access point. The roaming conditions can be flexibly changed to match the access point.
Trixbox SIP features: with Trixbox you have many telephone features such as voice mail, etc. to access these features you need sometimes to press the * key, on this telephone the * is accessible but it is a little awkward to get to. I thinking that may be using the * key to access the features that all I press is a numbers. Since it is only 4 days I may want to rethink this solution. Maybe I haven’t read the manual and maybe there is a simpler solution such as having the Trixbox functionality link to the speed dialing feature.
Startup problem that can be avoided: Initially due to documentation I had some initial problems with configuration. I was able to easily configure it but I had some problems determining the codec priority and figuring out how I would put a dot for the IP address. The savor was that I was able to get the telephone on regular Wi-Fi access point and link directly to the telephone web site. Yeah the telephone has it own website and you know that is very cool for configuration (check out the apply button on the top right after saving the configuration.) I’ve easily configure the telephone to the standard that I required and it works well after that. I will provided some screen shots of the configuration and hopefully you can avoid the same start up problems.
Strengths: Good Sound, Compact, Good Battery Life, Solid Connection, Automatic wireless mesh login (after setup), web configuration, simple to operator, connects easily with Trixbox, and Locustworld wireless mesh. Colour screen with SIP text messaging, easy to operate, NAT traversing configuration, works up to a .5 mile away (open air no obstacles using mesh access point)
Weaknesses: No CSA or European standards only USA FCC, documentation was online; no MAC address on box; funky startup screen; Thin plastic case, Buttons are average size but sometimes needs different pressure points to work. URL location requires IP address (not verified), Language limitation to only English and a few Asian languages.
Summary: I’ve purchased this phone to use as a better option than using SIP on my mesh network using Trixbox. Using the new Senao phone though the connection does not drop and the quality of sound is good. Overall I pleased with the purchase and the ease of use. I wanted a Wi-Fi telephone that was not heavily featured and that I could use the power of Trixbox and Locustworld to provide any additional features and I got what I wanted!
Wants or Improvements: Design for Asian Market languages are English and various Asian languages, it would be great to have French and Spanish available for North American market; Standards for Canada and Europe would have been good; no open standard (the telephone can easily be upgraded it would be fun to have the source code to make this telephone really appealing since EnGenius Senao’s SI-683H is driven by a highly integrated System-on-a-Chip, a single chip especially designed for wireless VoIP handsets, enabling a complete phone design with very few external components. There is no walkie-talkie features; I figure that most of municipalities that run Wi-Fi mesh networks would want to provide a VoIP services for the city as well as the public. A walkie-talkie feature would be helpful; No Video feature I’ve seen X-ten video feature on SIP and would think with the colour screen that a simple video camera would have been great for this product like the Nokia N800. Also there was no integrated messaging you know with all the MSN, Google, Yahoo messaging, email etc that this telephone could handle a few more features. A web browser would be great on this phone. I believe this phone has Linux core I could be wrong, but I think they have enough capacity to give a few more features. May the list is too long and maybe the designer wanted to keep it simple, thinking about it, the reason I bought the phone was for it’s simplicity.
Other thoughts: The USB charging is easy, fast and convenient; however, the USB cable was not provided so I use the cradle option instead. It would be nice if for the $200+ that a storage case for protection was included. Since the size of this is a high as my Blackberry but only 1/3 the width. My colleague calls it a 90’s retro styling and my 15 year old son calls it a walking cinderblock. Pretty harsh comments but the device is very handy and fit into any pocket. The plastic casing on the phone is thin and I would hate to drop it.
Hot Spot: The biggest feature I found was that it can use via an open network or secured networks. This really allows it to be used in many places for convenience since most free public open networks require browser authentication (not verified) with wireless mesh you can authenticate on the MAC address this gave the telephone ability to automatically authenticate and hope nodes with ease. This makes the phone very usable at hotels, airports, coffee shops etc. Right now I’m using it basically as a phone to use around the house with ones own wireless mesh network. All of my networking gear is made up of parts from Senao and I am very fond of their products, but this one has a way to go to make it truly useful.
Locustworld Network: What blew me away was the Locustworld mesh gave the Senao SI-683H the ability to automatic roaming the mesh cloud. This was really cool but I read (Senao) that there is limit to how many nodes you can pass before it drops the call, I haven’t encountered this problem. I know that when I was 4 hopes out the Senao with Locustworld mesh and Trixbox was a good combination. Once setup the Senao automatically roams to the most suitable access point based on the electromagnetic wave strength from the access point. The roaming conditions can be flexibly changed to match the access point.
Trixbox SIP features: with Trixbox you have many telephone features such as voice mail, etc. to access these features you need sometimes to press the * key, on this telephone the * is accessible but it is a little awkward to get to. I thinking that may be using the * key to access the features that all I press is a numbers. Since it is only 4 days I may want to rethink this solution. Maybe I haven’t read the manual and maybe there is a simpler solution such as having the Trixbox functionality link to the speed dialing feature.
Startup problem that can be avoided: Initially due to documentation I had some initial problems with configuration. I was able to easily configure it but I had some problems determining the codec priority and figuring out how I would put a dot for the IP address. The savor was that I was able to get the telephone on regular Wi-Fi access point and link directly to the telephone web site. Yeah the telephone has it own website and you know that is very cool for configuration (check out the apply button on the top right after saving the configuration.) I’ve easily configure the telephone to the standard that I required and it works well after that. I will provided some screen shots of the configuration and hopefully you can avoid the same start up problems.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home