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| Senao SI-7800H - WiFi SIP handset | ||
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The Senao SI-7800H is where the future of wireless telephony starts. Mobile Global roaming Internet Telephony without cables. You can hook up at any hotspot, will allways have the same phoneno., not pay any roaming rates and call at the same low rates, no matter where in the world you are. Sure, there are allready other WiFi SIP Phones around, but those don't really match the size of cellphones. They are pretty unhandy to carry around and usually their stand-by time isn't the best. This toy arrived at the end of January 2005 for the price of around 250 EUR incl. tax. The first impression, after having seen the ZyXEL Prestige P2000W, was great, because both quality of the casing, size and weight of this handset are what we are used to from most cellphones, where the ZyXEL felt cheap and unhandy, clumsy. The Senao weighs 83g and is 20*44*125mm big (H*W*L). Another feature, that most cellphones have and can be found here is the vibrator function, quite handy, when you have the phone in your pocket, set to silent and it rings. | |
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Even the specs for this fella look good. It supports G.729, G.726, G.723.1 and G.711 (ulaw and alaw) codecs, and is supposed to handle WEP, WPA and 802.1x and support roaming inbetween access points. Unfortunatly the current firmware only allows WEP 64 and 128 bit encryption. Options for anything else are not present. Up to 5 SSIDs can be entered for roaming purposes. The setup for WLan can be done with the build-in site survey tool, scanning for an accesspoing, selecting it from the list and join, that's it. Currently the phone only supports infrastructure mode, but it looks like, that there are future plans for adding ad-hoc networking. The phone is managed on the phone itself, via telnet or http, the menues are quite simple, options are easy to find. The maker clearly took their ideas from cellphones like the ones from Nokia or alike. Equiped with a 1000mAh Li-Ion battery the specs promise 100+ hours standby time and around 4 hours talk time, unfortunatly the stand by time is decreased dramatically, when you use the phone. In general I have it on the charger at least once every day in daily day use. If you are the owner of a Linksys WRT54G, a Dell TrueMobile 2300 or any other GemTek based accesspoint with Broadcom radio in there, don't even think about buying this phone currently. It copes very bad with connectivity losses from the Access Point, freezes in those situations and with the mentioned Access Points usually withing 10-15 minutes. When I replaced my Dell TM2300 with a DrayTek Vigor 2600VGi the behavior got a lot better. The phone only freezes maybe once a day, if at all. |
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The webinterface is clean and easy to understand. It gives you easy access to all the aspects, that you also can set from the phone itself. Even a usable help is build in. | |
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Specific the wireless settings for the phone are interesting, because it lets you set up to 5 SSIDs, that you want to roam in between, without manually having to tell the phone that fact. The site survey function is available from both the web interface and the phone itself. The picture below shows a comparison of size between an Ericsson T610 and the Senao SI-7800H. It's a bit smaller than what a Nokia 6210/6310(i) would be, quite handy. |
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Current status of testing: My phone arrived with firmware 0.03.0004 (2004-10-07) and that seemed to be awfully often freezing. I got my hands on a newer beta firmware (0.03.0008) that helped it a bit, but the freezing is happing far too often, and withing the first hour after turning the phone on it will hang. After replacing my Dell accesspoint these freezes fortunatly disappeared nearly completely. Once in a while, once a day at most, it freezes, mostly due to the fact, that it doesn't handle the loss of signal very well. I've tried to source a newer firmware and as soon as I get my hands on it, these pages will be updated with my findings. The range of the phone isn't great for european standards. I can get about 15 metres away from the AP, having one wall in between, before I loose the connection or the voice goes chunky. Also as long as Senao doesn't fix these hangs with Linksys/Dell APs, the phone is far from something, that should be sold in the shops, but once the problems are sorted, this will be an interesting WiFi SIP handset. Voice Quality is great. When the phone arrived, it was hooked up immidiatly, connected to my Asterisk box, G.729 selected as primary codec and tried. Nothing to complain there. Asterisk specific: DTMF: dtmfmode needs to be set to rfc2833. Inband and SIP-INFO DTMF modes are not accepted and there is also no option to configure this behavior. Be aware that the Senao will not feed the DTMF tones back to you. A bit annoying, but it does work. | |
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Created January 31st, 2005 - last updated: June 18th, 2005 | ||
