At a Glance: Cisco WIP310 WiFi IP Phone

Even though deskphones are far more popular than wireless handsets, there is still a need for some people to be able to walk around the office and still be able to take calls whereever they are.  Having a wireless phone usually means taking a regular cordless analog phone and connecting it to the phone system with an ATA and early WiFi phones suffered from poor reception and horrible battery life. The Cisco WIP310 (originally released as the Linksys WIP310) aims to solve these problems by providing a business class WiFi handset.

The WIP310 iPhone is one of the nicest feeling wireless phones I have personally seen, the fit and finish is excellent and the layout and design works very well. The handset has a nice weight and balance to it making it feel solid in your hands.

Setting up the phone is a two-step process. First, you need to use the handset itself to connect to your wireless access point. Once it is connected, you can then browse to the web interface on the device’s built-in web server to configure the phone. If you have used the SPA9xx or SPA5×5 series phones, then configuring the WIP310 will be second nature. Because the phone’s interfaces are so similair, I was able to get the WIP310 operational in just a couple of minutes, including getting the wireless working in the first place.

The WIP310 sits on a nice stylish base that doesn’t eat up a lot of desk space and acts as the charging station. Should you not want to use the base, you can charge the phone with a standard mini-USB cable off your computer or cell phone charger.

The call quality seems to be pretty nice although I really need to use it some more for further testing. On the left side is a speakerphone button that can be activated during a call. Since the phone uses rather small mic and speaker elements, the speakerphone isn’t awesome, but it is quite acceptable.

One question that comes up is why did Cisco pull the phone and relabel it from Linksys to Cisco? The answer is because Cisco is rebranding all of the Linksys products for businesses to the new label os Cisco Small Business Pro. For the time being this will allow for three different product groups, Cisco for Enterprise customers, Cisco Small Business Pro for small to medium business products, and Linksys for consumer products.

We will be digging into more detail about the Cisco WIP310 in a future article but our first impressions are that it is a really good device if you are looking for a wireless IP phone.

See more about the Cisco WIP310 at 888VoipStore.com.

Tags: Cisco, IP Phone, Linksys, SIP, VoIP Education, VoIP Hardware, VoIP Phones, VoIP Systems, WiFi