Belkin Wi-Fi Phone review

How would you score these phones?

One has a colour screen, connects over wifi and can make Skype calls when your Mac's 100 miles away. The other is a dull, mono mobile that feels as cheap as it looks, and is useless if your Mac isn't switched on, running the bundled driver and sitting within 100m of you. Oh, and it gobbles up one of your USB ports with a receiver dongle, too.

Easy, eh? Five full mice for the former; two, at best for the latter. Or is it?

The proper wireless handset - which connects over any 802.11g network and lets you use Skype without your Mac - is the sleek Belkin Wi-Fi Phone. It looks good, but the moment you pick it up, doubts set in. The buttons are dull and unresponsive, and this isn't helped by the fact its processor is slow.

Pick up the closest phone to you and use it to call a friend. Anyone at all, as long as they're not stored in the memory. Notice how you didn't pay much attention to what you were doing. You just dialled, waited for the pickup and talked: you didn't dwell on the buttons, and if it was a mobile, you probably all but ignored the screen. You can't do that with the Belkin, which demands your full attention to make sure your presses have registered.

At least the menus (also slow to react) are logical, well thought out and make good use of the large colour screen. Being able to view a contact's profile in full is great, but ultimately this has to be compared to a mobile phone - it's designed in part for use away from the home or office on the public Cloud network - and on that level it falls well short of what we'd expect. If this was a Sony Ericsson or Nokia handset, we doubt it would ever have got to market. We could cut it some slack on account of the fact it's designed for use on a free telephony service, not a premium GSM network, but not when it costs an eye-watering £106. Particularly when you can get a fully-fledged wifi Voip phone for Sip-based networks for less than £100.

And so to the Keyspan Cordless Voip Phone. It may not look so hot, but we'd choose it over and above the Belkin device, even if it doesn't afford us a colour screen, and can only make calls if our Mac is up and running and sitting within range.

The case feels cheap, but the buttons are responsive, and integration with the Mac-based Skype messenger is first class. Press a button on the phone and it appears on your Mac. Do the same on your Mac and there's the digit you punched proudly displayed on the handset screen. You can view your contact's names on screen and call them with a single key press, although you can't display their full profiles. Fortunately, you can scroll through them on the Mac's screen using the controls on the handset, which is a more than adequate workaround.

The driver's only visible icon sits in the Menu bar, from which you can pull down a range of controls. And all this for just £70, which isn't much more than you'd pay for a mic-equipped headset.

If you must have wireless, Mac-less access to Skype, the Belkin Wi-Fi Phone is the best we've seen so far, but to our mind it's not yet ready for the task in hand. We'd far rather plump for the more modest - and effective - Keyspan Cordless Voip phone, which we feel beats the technically superior Belkin.