"Nokia's European N61 phone is revered for its fantastic WiFi and VoIP features, but here in the US it's only sold as the crippled N61i, with support for neither."
Please try and keep your facts straight. Or try to have facts.
A: There is no N61, or N61i, however there is an E61 and E61i.
B: The Nokia E61 was primarily sold in Europe, although it was available on import sites
C: The Nokia E61 had WiFi and VoIP
D: The Nokia E61i is available stateside through importers and sites such as dell.com
E: The Nokia E61i also has WiFi and VoIP
F: The phone you are attempting to talk about that was crippled, was crippled by AT&T, it was AT&T branded, and it was sold exclusively through AT&T as the E62. It had a mini-usb port instead of the Nokia Pop-port (which couldn't charge the device), it had no wifi, and consequentially no VoIP.
If someone wanted the E61 and E61i, they could buy it from other venues.
I see no reason to ever buy from carriers anyways as they always load their handsets full of bloated branded garbage. This is the best way to tell carriers you'd rather not choose from their poor crippled handset selection. Alas, consumers don't do that, thus the situation we are put in.
All that said, for a carrier to support UMA they need back-end infrastructure to handle call handoff between the cell network and the wifi network, it's not something as simple as some magic app that you launch and presto, UMA. (Thus the two-number scenario mentioned in the article.) Anyone that's used T-mobile's UMA for any period of time has probably suffered at least a few instances of the service failing, being booted back to the cell network, dropped calls, firewalls closing down the audio to half the connection, etc. It's not a magic carrot.
Considering all this, the iPhone is especially refreshing, in that it doesn't have any of this carrier-branded cruft on it and you don't even need to go to a carrier store to buy it.
Please try and keep your facts straight. Or try to have facts.
A: There is no N61, or N61i, however there is an E61 and E61i.
B: The Nokia E61 was primarily sold in Europe, although it was available on import sites
C: The Nokia E61 had WiFi and VoIP
D: The Nokia E61i is available stateside through importers and sites such as dell.com
E: The Nokia E61i also has WiFi and VoIP
F: The phone you are attempting to talk about that was crippled, was crippled by AT&T, it was AT&T branded, and it was sold exclusively through AT&T as the E62. It had a mini-usb port instead of the Nokia Pop-port (which couldn't charge the device), it had no wifi, and consequentially no VoIP.
If someone wanted the E61 and E61i, they could buy it from other venues.
I see no reason to ever buy from carriers anyways as they always load their handsets full of bloated branded garbage. This is the best way to tell carriers you'd rather not choose from their poor crippled handset selection. Alas, consumers don't do that, thus the situation we are put in.
All that said, for a carrier to support UMA they need back-end infrastructure to handle call handoff between the cell network and the wifi network, it's not something as simple as some magic app that you launch and presto, UMA. (Thus the two-number scenario mentioned in the article.) Anyone that's used T-mobile's UMA for any period of time has probably suffered at least a few instances of the service failing, being booted back to the cell network, dropped calls, firewalls closing down the audio to half the connection, etc. It's not a magic carrot.
Considering all this, the iPhone is especially refreshing, in that it doesn't have any of this carrier-branded cruft on it and you don't even need to go to a carrier store to buy it.
