Unidata WPU 7700

Unidata WPU 7700: At a Glance

This model has been discontinued.

Category	Rating (0-5)
First Impressions
Phone Configuration
Junction Networks Testing
Voice Quality
Ease of Use

Last week, we reviewed the SQ 3000, the world’s first Wifi VoIP video phone from Korean-based Unidata Communication Systems, Inc. Overall, the phone was impressive, but we did bump into a few issues while running our interoperability test on the firmware version 1.9.1 G. Almost immediately after the review was posted, we got word from a distributor that most of the kinks we mentioned will be ironed out in the near future. We will do our best to keep you updated on any progress.

For this review, we’re going to be taking a look at another offering from Unidata, the WPU 7700. This phone was highly recommended to us by a US partner/distributor of Unidata products so we were very interested in testing it out for ourselves.

An interesting thing to note about Unidata products is that in Korea, they’re mostly aimed at the consumer market. Apparently, VoIP is pretty big in South Korea, where over two million people have signed on to LG’s VoIP service alone. The WPU 7700 seems to be the preferred end point of choice for LG’s subscribers--they are selling like hotcakes! Over 1.44 million units have been sold as of December last year and we heard that LG plans on ordering hundreds of thousands more. [Press release here.]

As you may already know, when we do reviews like this, we look at things from a business perspective by asking ourselves whether or not the phone will excel in a working office. It will certainly be interesting to see if the WPU 7700, a phone that’s clearly fantastic for the consumer market, will fare just as well in a corporate environment.

Unidata WPU 7700 Feature Overview

This is taken from a WPU 7700 brochure available at Unidata.

* means optional

Price: ~$180

First Impressions

The WPU 7700 is actually quite simple in design. To be frank, there’s nothing particularly elegant about the hardware. The round charger looks like a flying saucer out of a 50-year-old Sci-fi movie and both it and the handset share a glossy metallic color (there are other colors). The phone has a very bright backlit color display that is very well made. Although it is small, you won’t notice since almost everything you need fits all on one screen.

Underneath the display, there are two context sensitive soft keys, and a navigation wheel with shortcuts hard programmed into each direction: left is ‘Alarm/Wakeup Call’, right is ‘Message Center’, down is ‘My Menu’ and up takes you to the list of wireless networks in range. Other hard keys excluding the standard numpad include a ‘mute’ button, and a button that allows you to conduct Google searches.

A quick click on the context sensitive ‘menu’ key will take you a very nicely designed list of contact management options. Press left or right on your navigation wheel and you will come across five other equally visually appealing menus: Settings, Screen, Messages, etc.

Phone Configuration

To connect to your wireless network, go to ‘WLAN Search’. You can get there by going to your Menu >> Settings or by simply pushing UP on your navigation wheel. Scroll to your network and click ‘Add’. It will prompt you for your admin password, which, unless you’ve changed it somehow, should default to ‘000000’. The phone will then take you through the regular steps to connecting to your network: security setting, network setup: DHCP, NAT traversal: none.

We found that the best way to set up your account information was through the web server, which, we’re happy to say, is a lot better than the web server available for the SQ 3000.

First, you’ll need your WPU 7700’s IP address. To get this simply go to ‘Menu’ >> ‘Settings’ >> ‘My phone info’ and click the left or right on your navigation wheel until you get to ‘Network info’. Next you’ll need to unlock the ‘PC Sync’. Go to ‘Menu’ >> ‘Settings’ >> ‘Security’ and you’ll be asked for a user password (Default is ‘0000’). Scroll down to ‘Lock PC Sync’ and change it to ‘enable’. It will ask you to enter a password that you’ll use later to access the web server (We just put in ‘000000000000’ since its easy to remember).

Now put your phone’s IP address into your web browser followed by ‘:8080’. This should take you to an almost blank page that says ‘Welcome to "WPU-7700 PC-Sync" ‘. Input the password you just set to get in.

You’ll be taken to a screen where you can input your contacts, and sort them according to groups. Not exactly what we’re looking for, but a pretty cool feature nonetheless.

Click on ‘Setup’ in the upper right hand corner of your page. It will ask you for an ID and password. If you remember from earlier, those would be ‘admin’ and ‘000000’, respectively.

You’ll come upon a page with plenty of information and fields to input your settings. There are a lot of things you won’t need to touch to get your phone up and running. Users will, however, need to fill out ‘User account’ and ‘Server Settings’. After you fill out the necessary info, you will need to reboot your phone, which you can do right from your browser. It takes about 30 seconds, maybe even less.

All in all, setting up and configuring your WPU 7700 isn’t too bad. The web server includes everything you’ll need to almost completely customize how your phone handles calls.

Junction Networks Interoperability Test

At Junction Networks, we put each of the phones we use through a multi-step interoperability test in which we put the phones through 30 test cases. An example of a test case would be the following:

“Test phone calls phone B

B picks up

B puts Test phone on hold

B calls phone C

C picks up

B transfers test phone to C

Call must be transferred correctly to C. B must be released correctly after the transfer. When C picks up, audio must work in both ways between test phone and C. When test phone is on hold, there is no audio between it and phone B.”

We are very happy to say that the Unidata WPU 7700 passed each test.

All tests were done on firmware version 2.8.0 0.

Voice Quality

The WPU 7700 supports both G.711 and G.729. The call quality you experience on this phone will depend a lot on the device at the other end of the line. If the person on the other end is using a headset, then you’ll usually get very good voice clarity and call quality. If he or she is using a handset, it will still sound pretty good to you, but it might come off as a bit muffled in comparison to wideband calling. We wouldn’t recommend having a call with someone using a speakerphone; it kind of sounds like you’re talking from the inside of a fish tank to the other person, and the voice quality you get isn’t all that great either. It’s not absolutely terrible, but definitely the worst of the three by far.

Ease of Use

The controls on this phone are very intuitive, making the WPU 7700 especially user-friendly. As we already mentioned in the ‘first impressions’ section of this review, the 5 menus of phone features/settings are very well made. Up to 7 list options fit on one screen so you will probably never even notice the size of the display screen. There are a lot of menus and even menus within menus, so Unidata makes it a bit easier on you by including a ‘My menu’ shortcut located conveniently in the navigation wheel. When you select any option, clicking on the ‘menu’ soft key allows you to add it to ‘My menu’, a customized menu of shortcuts to the things you use most often.

The phone includes a few neat applications like a calculator, a calendar, a map with world times, and a Google browser. The Google search feature actually works pretty well. You only get very limited text-based versions of pages, of course, but you can refresh pages, and even go back or forward one page using the options you get when you press the ‘menu’ button.

There’s no ‘redial’ button but if you’re putting in a number that you’ve called before, the WPU 7700 will try to auto-complete it for you, even if the number isn’t in your list of contacts. A list of the numbers the phone thinks you’re trying to redial pops up and you can easily select the one you want. Like the SQ 3000, there are no dedicated hard or soft keys for ‘hold’ and ‘transfer’. Clicking on the ‘menu’ soft key during a call will give you the ‘hold’ option. Putting a call on hold also pulls up a blank screen where you can dial another number. Once you’re in a second call, the ‘menu’ soft key will now have a ‘transfer’ option that connects the two people at the end of your different lines. This means that you cannot do blind transfers using this phone.

A blind transfer would be the following:

"A calls B
B picks up the call
B transfers the call to C"

B, in this case, is the caller using a WPU 7700.

Final Thoughts

Overall the WPU 7700, a phone aimed at the consumer market in Korea, translates very well into a device for a mobile business environment. It’s a light, WiFi solution that’s easy to use. Perhaps more importantly, it just works—the phone flew through our interoperability tests with no problems. The call quality, while not ‘HD’, isn’t half bad either.

That’s not to say that this phone doesn’t have limitations. The lack of speakerphone, and conferencing options has not gone unnoticed (The WPU 7700 cannot start a conference, but of course it can participate in one). Also if you plan on doing a lot of calling and need to manage multiple lines, this phone probably isn’t the way to go.

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Average: 3 (3 votes)