Netgear's Phone in the Rough

(page 2 of 2)

Sound quality was excellent, and my friend could hear me just fine, though he said there were a few moments here and there where my voice sounded a bit muffled.

Good Sound Until It's Gone

The second call was to another friend—this one a college professor based in Hong Kong, also a Skype user, again from my home in Manhattan. In this case, he had turned on a forwarding feature, and so all calls to his Skype account were automatically forwarded to his mobile phone. To make it all the more interesting, he happened to be traveling in Shanghai when I called. Believe it or not, the quality of this call was even better than that of the call to D.C.

Again we chatted for the better part of an hour with almost no complaints about sound quality. The call was terrific, with one glaring exception: After about 40 minutes or so, the call inexplicably dropped. I don't know if the cause was network trouble on one end, or a button mistakenly pushed. But the call ended quite suddenly.

In both cases, the only other drawback I noticed was that the phone seemed to get kind of hot after extended use. But pretty much every cell phone on the market starts to warm up with a call that lasts longer than 10 minutes.

What's for Dinner?

I had no complaints on subsequent calls. I've called regular land-line phones, other Skype users, and cell phones all over the world and within the U.S., and had no difficulty or serious problems to report.

One thing I didn't care for, however, was the inability to just dial a phone number and call whoever on a whim. At one point, I decided to order a burrito for dinner from a local Mexican takeout place and wanted to just dial the number from memory. I couldn't do this, but instead had to go through the arduous process of adding the place to my list of Skype contacts, which also meant typing out the name and phone number (complete with a + sign in front of the one and the area code).

Once that was done I scrolled down the screen through my list of contacts to the one for the burrito place, hit the "call" button, and that was that. There ought to be a way to make a call on the fly to a regular phone.

Waiting for Second Gen

At a purchase price of $249, I can't recommend this widely unless you are a particularly heavy Skype user who travels often, and has the patience for the setup. However, I think the basic idea behind this handset and those like it—Belkin sells a similar one that also runs on the Skype service—are a great idea that can and should be made better. I'd also like to see these vendors add to their lineups phones for competing services, specifically The Gizmo Project.

In time, this phone's features will be increasingly common in household cordless phones as ever more consumers start building home networks and using VoIP services. I understand that this is only a first-generation product, and as such it should be expected to have some kinks. There's enough potential here that I'm eagerly awaiting an improved second-generation product to see how those kinks are worked out.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.