This is something I wrote to the UTStarCom wi-fi phone forum.  You have to sign up for a support account and jump through hoops galore just to get to their forum, so I thought I’d share it openly as a sort of review.

In 10 words or less: Don’t buy it if you don’t have $200 to waste.

It holds promise, but it’s very far from a ‘working’ implementation.

It’s glitzy. It’s glamourous. The physical design of the phone is quite nice. I’m actually okay with the speaker volume (although volume controls for more than just ‘ringtone’ would be handy), but the rest of it, so far, has left me unenthusiastic.Issues so far:

1. WEP doesn’t work. I’ve tried it on numerous different kinds of wireless routers. 64 bit and 128 bit keys. No dice. When WEP is active, the phone simply doesn’t grab an IP and do what it’s supposed to. (while this might not matter to many, I live in a world where my network needs to be WEP to accomodate my WPA-less Sony AIBO that’s connected to my wireless network… that and there are many WEP networks out there that people might want to use).

2. Poor design on keepalive. Right now, the only way for the phone to keep a NAT connection alive is to reregister every X seconds in order to keep data going through the NAT tunnel so it doesn’t time out. This is a bit like thwarting modem timeouts by redialing/connecting/logging on every 60 seconds. SIP’s registration was NOT designed as a NAT keepalive, and to use it for such is a pretty poor hack. There are options requests, NAT pings, and various other methods (subscribe, notify, etc) which actually WERE designed more to keep a network connection alive, and which don’t require a reauthentication handshake every 60 seconds to keep a tunnel open.

3. Overall connection issues. Connecting and reconnecting to a wireless hotspot when going in and out of range is a bit like pulling teeth. UTStarCom advertises the wondrous nature of how their phone can roam from one AP to another without dropping a call, seamlessly and magically. In reality, I have a hard enough time connecting to ONE AP, much less taxing the poor phone’s logic to reconnect.

4. Features disappearing from spec. Downloadable ringtones? Downloadable wallpaper? These things just sort of vanished from the list of possibilities. Will they ever come back? Who can say…

5. Documentation. The documentation is about like looking at an API function reference. It’s a book filled with one or two line descriptions of each function, without examples, without anything detailed enough for the average user to know what logic was in the minds of the developers when they created feature X. While that may be just fine for someone buying a phone from a retailer who’s bundling it with a preconfigured service plan, for anyone else, it’s less than helpful.

6. Did I mention a lack of something as simple as onboard volume controls with granularity? Oh… wait… I did. Perhaps I just felt it needed to be reiterated. The idea that I can’t control the volume of any tones without altering some sort of global ring parameter is just… odd.

7. Logical mystery. I’ve seen the explanation of why the phone can’t be allowed to connect to SIP servers that have their SIP ports at, say, port 80, but as a former TCP developer, I’m somewhat astounded that there aren’t more people who balked at the poor explanation. If I connect to a SIP server at port 80, the connection has to come back to the phone’s port 80 and would hit the webserver? Does this mean I can’t send email from a machine running an email server, as return communications would hit the email server and not the client? Or run a web browser from a machine running a web server? That someone even suggested a user get a new provider because of this ridiculous limitation in the UA is laughably negligent. If I’d seen one of my developers give that line to ANYone, he’d have been fired on the spot. “I’m sorry, but this car only goes forward and reverse. It has no steering wheel. I recommend you only drive on roads that require no turns.”

Seriously…. this seems like it could potentially be a great phone, but either its limitations need to be taken seriously and overcome, or there needs to be more detailed and valid information about its limitations available somewhere so that future buyers can make the informed decision to go with another hardware provider.

I’ll keep mine on the off chance that someday it might actually be worth using (after all, since it was research to see if we wanted to bundle it with our services, it’s tax-deductible), but for now, it sits in the corner with the other hardware that didn’t live up to its promises.