Analysts at Juniper Research expect WiFi Phones to be completely absent from the electronics market within 5 years. I can’t say I disagree with them. Services like Skype are wonderful, and products like Linksys’ iPhone and this Samsung Skype Phone (shown above) are great ideas, but they require you to be near a computer or a router, which makes them great as cordless phones if you have VOIP service at home, or if you use your computer to make calls, but not really effective for carrying around with you as a low-cost replacement for a cellular phone, especially if you have to jump from wifi hotspot to hotspot in order to make calls. Dealing with encrypted networks is still buggy even on the best WiFi phone models, and choosing and switching among available networks is problematic. The technology is great, it’s just not a very good replacement for already extant cellular technology when it comes to portability, and WiFi phones may not penetrate so much in the home since household VOIP services like Vonage already have cordless devices that work with their services.

Juniper claims that the best use for the technology and their expected path for WiFi calling to take would be to find more cellular phones with WiFi capability, meaning more and more phones that can call on a traditional cellular network, but if you’re looking to save money and you’re sitting in a Panera or a Starbucks, you can switch to WiFi mode and place Skype calls for free. It’s an intriguing idea, but I wonder if it’ll save the idea of the WiFi enabled phone, when cellular does all of that already at a price that’s relatively affordable to the consumer. We’ll see.

[ PC World :: Death Knell for Wi-Fi Phones? ]