D-Link V-Click / Neuf Cegetel TWIN / WNC GW1

Due Q2 2007 (D-Link) / Out now (Neuf Cegetel)
4th October 2006

D-Link today announced the V-Click hybrid GSM/VOIP mobile phone (pictured right), a fairly conventional looking phone on the outside with with some clever built-in software to allow Voice Over WLAN calls.

It's an interesting looking device, but D-Link's press release is an absurd piece of self-puffery. D-Link didn't build the V-Click, and they're quite late to market with it. D-Link buy in many of their devices  from third parties, and as a result the quality of products is extremely variable.

In fact, the V-Click is manufactured by Taiwanese company Wistron NeWeb Corp and is sold as the WNC GW1 (pictured below left), announced in January 2006. Also, since mid-2006, the same handset has been available in France as the Neuf Cegetel TWIN (pictured below right). Quite why it has taken so long for D-Link to badge-engineer this is a mystery.

Call it what you will, the D-Link V-Click / Neuf Cegetel TWIN looks interesting on paper. It's a Linux-based smartphone with a 176x220 pixel display weighing 95 grams, designed to switch easily between VOIP/VoWLAN calls and GSM at the press of a button. However, there's no camera and the internal memory is just 24Mb with no memory expansion, so its use as a multimedia player is limited. Surprisingly, there's no Bluetooth - so you can't add a headset to it. It does have email support and the Opera web browser, plus all the standard functions you'd expect in a GSM handset though.

Estimates on battery life vary - on GSM the V-Click / TWIN gives 4-5 hours talktime and around 8 days standby. For VOIP, talktime is 2-4 hours (D-Link say 2, Neuf Cegetel and WNC 4) with a maximum standby time of just 50 hours. If using it on WiFi, you'll probably need to remember to keep a charger handy.

Ultimately, devices like this tend to be a little tricky to set up and it often comes down to the quality of the documentation. Fortunately, D-Link's documentation tends to be quite good, but we're afraid that we can't vouch for the hardware - these days the "D-Link" name on a product is not particularly reassuring.

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