Panasonic launches $400 wifi Skype phone

By Adam Turner
Tuesday, 06 March 2007 18:50

Mobility

With wifi-enabled cellphones hitting the market, $US400 seems a hefty price tag for Panasonic's Skype-only wifi phone.

The KX-WP1050 Panasonic Wi-Fi Phone lets you make Skype calls without the need for a computer. It comes with a leather travel case which also has room for the portable wifi base station, allowing you to easily set up the phone and make calls where ever you have a broadband connection. It can also connect to wifi hotspots.

The phone displays your Skype contact list on the screen, complete with presence details, and lets you make Skype to Skype calls as well as use the SkypeIn and SkypeOut services. The 730mAh Lithium-ion battery can provide up to a 55 hours standby time, and 4.5 hours talk time, and can be charged with the included travel router, or from a USB connection on a PC.

The $400 price tag seems quite steep considering the KX-WP1050 is not a cellphone as well, so you can only use it to make Skype calls. Sure it comes with a wireless travel router, but you can buy a separate wifi Skype phone and travel router for less. The KX-WP1050 seems to be targeted at home users and business travellers wanting to make Skype calls from hotel rooms, but in both scenarios you'd probably have your desktop or notebook computer at hand. Sure it's slightly more convenient to make Skype calls without a computer, but $400 more convenient - considering your computer is probably nearby?  

Combination wifi/cell phones - know as dual mode handsets - are set to be the Next Big Thing. Analysts group Juniper Research predicts the worldwide market for VoIP-over-wifi handsets will grow to almost $US70 billion by 2012, but that only 2 per cent of this will be wifi-only handsets like Panasonic's KX-WP1050.

For $400 to $500 you'll probably be able to pick up an Apple iPhone, which is a cellphone that has wifi and runs OSX so it should happily run a Skype client. For the same price you could also pick up a Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6.0-based cellphone and do the same thing - although many lack the grunt to run Skype well. Dual mode handsets with built-in VoIP are unlikely cost much more.

The same thing happened with home wifi phones, the early models were wifi only but it didn't take long for cordless dual mode VoIP/PSTN phones to hit the market - like Cisco's iPhone. Once they came out, VoIP-only phones looked quite shabby.

However you look at it, $400 for a Skype-only handset seems like a bad long term investment considering what's coming in the next year or so.