QuickPhones follow up....

Well, it has been a bit over a week with the QuickPhones QA-342. So, I thought I would follow up with my view on the hardware so far.

So far, I have not had time to dig in to the multiple AP problem any farther than I had during the last post. But, to get the phone working, I set up a NetGear AP with a different SSID. After doing that, the phone has been reasonably stable.

One of the key things that interested me in this phone was the battery life. So, I let it charge over the weekend that I got it, and have left it powered on, our of the cradle for the last 7 days. Looking at the phone just now, it shows the battery is at 75%. As a result, this phone certainly meets my needs for battery life!

I REALLY wish I could say that the rest of the phone meets my needs. Since I started using it, I have come up with a pretty hefty list of complaints about the phone. Obviously, the first one is with the multi-AP support.

I cut the QuickPhones guys a lot of slack initially about this. Mostly because they were so responsive about getting me access to the 4.0 firmware. It seemed like they were a solid company that really wanted to make a top-notch product. In the last week, my opinion has changed. Early last week, I e-mailed my list of issues to their support people, and included information about my credentials for wireless and offered to help them in debugging the issues. That e-mail seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Later in the week, I pinged them again to verify that they had gotten my first e-mail. Again, I got no response.

Now, let me go off on a bit of a side rant here. I did something in my e-mail to support that I rarely do. I gave them information about my credentials as a wireless networking professional, and wireless network software developer. I generally don't do this because I have been in too many big box electronics stores where the sales people claim to be experts on a topic by nature of working for that store. I don't want to come off sounding like those people. That said, I did include that information in my e-mail to their support people. The main reason being that I liked the build of the phone and wanted to help them get the issues hammered out so I could purchase more of them.

Which leads me back to the additional issues I have seen. The sound quality on the phone is sub-par. There was a lot of static in the background when I was talking to someone. This wasn't comfort noise type static, this was pops and clicks as if packets were being lost in transit. Since it is wireless, and running at 2.4Ghz, I can understand a little bit of that. But, when I compare it to my older D-Link phone the sound quality is night and day. The D-Link was crystal clear, the QuickPhones was less than ideal.

The other sound quality issue I had is with the volume. I will be the first one to admit that I have been to too many loud concerts, and played my stereo louder than I should. So, I don't have the best hearing in the world. So, I usually like to have my phones turned up fairly loud so I can hear everything clearly. When the QuickPhones was to quiet, I tried to use the volume buttons on the side of the phone to increase the in-call volume. From what I could tell, the volume buttons didn't do anything. Again, I have not had time to play with the phone enough to determine if the volume is all the way up, or if the buttons just don't work how I would expect. But, the sound really isn't good.

Which leads me to the next sound related issue. The front of the phone is curved. If the sound on the phone was better, I suspect I wouldn't have noticed this. But, since I was straining to hear the sound, I noticed the curvature of the phone kept it from feeling like it fit nicely against my ear. While this seems like a nit, keep in mind that the vast majority of phones out there are flat. I have to believe there is a reason for that.

So, what comes next? Well, I am supposed to take delivery of a Unidata WPU7700 phone today. It should be interesting to see how it stacks up to the D-Link and the QuickPhones. I also took delivery of an OpenVox A400E board about an hour ago. So, I expect to blog a bit more about the installation an effort involved in getting those running.