Living in a house with 3 women, you quickly find yourself waiting to use the phone. I have a separate line for my business calls already and it’s a VoIP phone setup with Vonage. However, I was in need of another line now that my daughters have discovered the phone. Rather than simply adding another Vonage line to my existing router I decided to try out their Wi-Fi Phone.

The Vonage Wi-Fi Phone is similar to a cell phone. But rather than use a cellular service (and all the pay by minute issues), it uses your wireless internet connection to make/receive calls over your broadband internet service. You can get the phone as an add on to your existing service or as I did in my case, you can get it with a new phone number/line. When ordered through Vonage directly, the phone ships ready to be used (activated). I installed the battery and turned it on. It immediately started searching for wireless access points. It found mine, but I had to navigate through the menus on the phone to set it up and save it since my Wi-Fi connection is password protected. This was a piece of cake although it didn’t connect the first time with the password. Once it cycled through a second time, it connected and remained connected. You can store the settings for up to 4 networks that you frequent.

The next thing I knew I was making calls as I would with any other phone. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Now you can take your home phone with you, say to your vacation home or any where else that you would like to receive calls as long as there is a Wi-Fi connection. Although you can enter both WEP and WPA passwords, I’m not sure if this phone would work in a public internet setting such as a coffee shop if you had to accept their terms before being connected to the service. Many public/free internet cafés and hotels require that you log on first with a web browser and accept their terms before you can use the internet. Since the phone doesn’t have a web browser, there doesn’t appear to be any way to do this. If you travel with your own router such as the AirPort Express, (for connecting to the hotel’s high speed internet) then this won’t be an issue. You can accept the terms each day from your computer and then your phone should be good to go.

Over all I’m pleased with the phone and I was amazed at how small it was. Think Nokia or Sony Ericsson cell phone size. I was a little disappointed that the phone doesn’t allow you to access it’s internal address book from your computer. You should be able to download your address book from your computer into it. This seems to be an oversight seeing that they do allow you the option to access the phone from your computer using a web browser to set up the WEP/WPA access. While they do provide a charging adapter, a cradle/stand would have been better. Calls seem to be very clear and that’s what really counts. Battery life will be the next test. $79.99 for the phone, voice plans starting at $14.95/month.