Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, wherefore art thou Wi-Fi?

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I’m annoyed with Hewlett Packard for ignoring the VoIP possibilities of the Mobile Messenger, and so should you be. If you haven’t tried VoIP yet, why on Earth not? As soon as you’ve finished reading this high-tail it over to www.skype.com and download the free software for your PC and for your Pocket PC. Then sort out your account details and tell all your friends you’re on. Then try to keep a straight face while you tell me VoIP is not a fabulous technology.

Anyway, back to the point in hand. It isn’t all doom, gloom and more doomy gloom for those keen to get Wi-Fi on a SIM toting PDA. Not every hardware manufacturer seems to start from the point of view of operator requirements. I-mate, for example, pops both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi into its new SIM-toting PDA2 which I’ve been messing about with for a couple of weeks now.

The PDA2 has not been taken on by any operators in the UK, though Expansys and Smart Devices Direct are among those selling it without an operator deal. I-mate also goes a step further down the line. The company announced in February this year that it would pre-load Skype’s VoIP software on devices. The PDA2 is the first I’ve seen with the Skype client on its ROM. It took me less than half a minute to get going with this, giving me Skype calls at home whenever I’m in range of my network.

The PDA2 is rather similar to some of the devices in O2’s XDA line, some of which also offer Wi-Fi (compare the four XDA’s in the range [linkout:http://www.my-xda.com/comp.html here. It’ll be interesting to see what O2 does next with its XDA line-up, though. The Wi-Fi toting devices were released before VoIP started to become really popular.

Of course not everyone wants a fully fledged PDA. I’m keen to see Wi-Fi in a smartphones, because then VoIP becomes a proposition much more likely to take off in the wider, consumer and prosumer sectors. But you’ll have to look a lot harder to find Wi-Fi on a smartphone than on a PDA. So hard, in fact, that your eyes might pop. Because I don’t know of any smartphone available in the UK today with Wi-Fi integrated.

With this in mind I am pretty interested in the Samsung i730 which runs Windows Mobile 2003 but has a very phone-like look, a sliding top section that protects a weeny keyboard, and has Wi-Fi built in. I’ve not yet been lucky enough to see one in the flesh, but its arrival in the US is imminent as I write and it should be available there as you read.

Now Wi-Fi has more uses than just allowing people to make voice calls over the Internet. In fact, my main Wi-Fi use is Web browsing. I’ll do this on PDAs if pushed, but a laptop lives in my front room purely to act as a Web terminal. If I could persuade more family and friends onto Skype it would double as a communications console and VoIP usage in my home would rise.

But for people whose lives aren’t punctuated with IT to try out, having more than one Wi-Fi laptop in the home is still a bit unusual. What would change this is having Wi-Fi in your phone. Which takes me right back to square one: put Wi-Fi in her handset and I’d bet that my mother will use Skype far more than she currently uses it from her laptop, simply because it will suddenly be much more convenient.

I’m really looking forward to that. But maybe the telephony providers aren’t so keen.

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