A phone with wifi...

checkers015

New member
I'm going to be off too UW next year, and having wifi in their buildings, I decided that I would like to opt for a phone that can take advantage of the connection.

Primarily, I plan to do light browsing (facebook) for short periods of time as well as use some kind of voip software. Does anyone know a good phone for this?
 
UW? Which UW? Are you planning to stick with Rogers as your carrier?

Don't count on VOIP working well on a cell phone. They don't have the processing power or capacity to make it really useful. Voice quality is generally pretty low and just not useful for an intelligent conversation.
 
Well, what else are you looking for besides wifi? Multimedia features? Decent Camera? Qwerty Keyboard? Small and thin? etc....

Also, My experience with voip on my phone at my campus hasn't been all that good. At home, it's sometimes alright but at campus not so much. I've had more success with services such as Jajah and iSkoot. With Jajah you can call all over the world on your mobile for a few cents a minute. You enter the number you want to call over your data connection (or wifi) and then you instantly get a call that connects you to that number. However, you really need unlimited incoming to take advantage of this. The call quality isn't perfect but it's passable. There's a similar way to get unlimited cheap calls using My5 but I won't get into that. See this http://www.jajah.com/info/help/faq/mobile for more info on jajah.
 
UW as in Waterloo in Canada

I'm going to be using Fido (per second billing) and if possible, use voip for internet-calling my parents back home.

To be honest, I hardly use minutes... unlimited weeknights+weekends should hold me over. As for the phone, a camera that can snap up pictures that are good enough for facebook would suffice for me... but I have my heart set out on a phone that can support wifi (for facebook purposes mainly...)

I had the nokia n80 recommended to me... anyone know anything better?
 
Well...the Nokia N95, a phone similar to the N80, is exceptional but it's double the price. It has almost every feature you'd ever want so it might be worth it....



Some other somes you may want to consider are...
-Nokia Nokia 93i
-Toshiba G500
-Nokia E61i
-HTC Tytn
-O2 XDA Stealth

But anyways there are dozens of phones with wifi and reasonable cameras so there may be something better for you out there.
 
I use the HTC P3300, the wifi g runs super smooth on my campus network (UFT) and I can easily browse any website without a hassle using opera browser. The camera on it is 2mp so its descent, but if your looking for something intense, N95 is there as well, except it chugs battery like no tomorrow.
What features are you looking for besides wifi/cam?
like QWERTY keyboard? touchscreen? etc.
 
Outside of a camera good enough for facebook pictures and wifi, I ask for nothing else...

500 cdn is about as far as my budget will stretch (i live near pacific mall, so deals are pretty good) and if I COULD get a windows mobile, I might spring for it... there are certain windows mobile specific apps that I would like to have and to my knowledge, s60 does not have a working emulator for even winmobile03
 
Check this out
http://sntradersonline.com/phone_details.php?product_id=snp468

Its 550, he takes off 50 bucks if you go pick it up and im quite certain there are plenty of retailers in Pacific Mall as well offering this. So for 500-550 you could easily find ourself a WM5 phone with 2mp cam and wifi.

I jst paid more for the GPS. But yeah, WM5 is highly customizable
 
Forget windows mobile 5 for $500. You can get the t-mobile dash (essentially the same as Rogers HTC S621) with windows mobile 6 for under $300 shipped. You get WM6, Wifi, and a full qwerty keyboard. However, the camera is only 1.3 MP.
 
Nokia's e-series devices seem to fit your bill, especially since they do a great job on voip. My only hesitation with the suggestion is that Symbian phones do not support synchronizing category information (like address book groups and calendar categories).
 
im in a situation close to the original poster

my main wifi question is:

my campus uses whats called a "captive portal" log in i believe, its the kind where you connect but then you have to open up your browser and it redirects to a log in page to put in studentID and password

so i was wondering, do phones like E61i (S60), S710(WM6) or S620 (WM5) work with such wifi technology?

thanks alot in advance
 
My college uses the same or similar technology and I have never had a problem logging on when using a WM5 device. My guess is WM6 and S60 would be fine as well.

It's really annoying always having to log on though. It's part of the reason I gave up on mobile voip. It was such an inconvenience to make a call it just ended up not being worth it.
 
yea I hear ya, I got excited about voip and skype thinking i could save some money but it doesnt seem that practical.

thanks for the help, now the tough decision will be which one to get haha
 
thanks alot, yea i really like the large screen and the browser on the E61i and wifi is a huge part of my decision, i think the setup should be easy, right?

and sorry if im hijacking this topic
 
You may want to look at the E61i, it has WiFi and good enough RAM and processor speed to do simple web browsing, a full QWERTY, the S60 Symbian smartphone OS and the price is not as steep as say N95 or a HTC TyTN.
 
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