A while back I posted about my grief with the Linksys WIP330 WiFi SIP phone (it doesn’t happen often, but it’s a surprise when the ONLY hit you get on Google about a problem is your own blog post discussing it). The unit is still a bitter disappointment, but thanks to a firmware update it seems like it’s finally at least usable on my network.
My previous post talked about problems I was having with the network connection dropping out after an hour on a WPA-PSK network. When last I checked, the most recent firmware was no improvement in that regard. However, I checked again last week and a couple of new updates to firmware have been released. You need to go to Linksys’ US site to download the recent firmware though (Australia only has the 1.02.12S version that is a problem for me, while 1.03.18S is on the US site).
I also had problems using the phone menus to do the upgrade. The WIP330 has a menu selection that lets you enter a URL for the phone to download its own firmware update, but this didn’t work for me. I suspect it’s because the Linksys site that the firmware is hosted on is using an expired SSL certificate… Downloading the file to my desktop and uploading the firmware through the phone’s web page worked fine as an alternative method.
The phone has been on my WPA network all day continuously now, and it makes and receives calls without drama. I’ve never had the problem that some folks report where the phone ignores incoming calls. So, as a phone, it’s functional and I’ll be including it in my ring groups and queues now. As a Wi-Fi device, though, it’s still short. For something that’s supposedly built on Windows CE, there’s precious little PDA or network function in it.
The two things I thought I could do with the unit (other than just use it as a phone) have both come up busted. First was to use the “web cam” function to grab rain radar images from the Bureau of Meteorology — but the function only seems to work with actual web cams that generate a Windows Media stream, and not just an image that refreshes at intervals. Next, when I found that you can use the web interface to upload and download data such as the phonebook, I thought I could write something that dumped my LDAP contact database into the right format to upload to it. I still could, if I could hack the crappy VB/.NET encrypted file format they use on it. Bah, humbug.
There’s talk on the ‘Net about folks who load CE device drivers and play with it from Windows, so maybe if I was a Windows user there would be more I could do with it.
One thing I will do with it is try it on public Wi-Fi. That’s the only differentiator I can see between it and a normal cordless phone attached to an ATA — you certainly shouldn’t buy one of these just to use at home. If it’s fairly easy to strap up to public Wi-Fi then it becomes much more useful (but then I have to wonder how often I’m near public Wi-Fi and needing to make a call I couldn’t make on a normal mobile… it might have been useful when I was stuck in Melbourne airport for three hours the other week though).
Now that it stays on the network I can use it as a phone. Fine. I still regret not knowing in advance about the iPod touch, because I would rather have put that money toward the touch…
Crossed Wires 