With VoIP becoming all the rage and appearing in consumer devices, there's lots of interesting products for us to look at. A consumer-level VoIP telephone that we've had in the queue for a few weeks is the Z-Connect G668 (www.networkworld.com, DocFinder: 8837) from Soyo Group.

Our first impression was that this is rather ugly. The body is conventionally shaped and smooth black plastic, but it and the handset are trimmed with a brown, leather-textured material. Yuck. And the handset also has a pointless silver highlight strip. These details give the telephone a cheesy, '70s look.

Leaving aesthetics aside, the G668 is easy to set up if you have a DHCP-enabled network - you just connect it to the network (then plug your PC into the phone - the phone provides a pass-through service), power it up, and it works. During our tests the call quality was good to very good.

On-network calls between Z-Connect phones are free and the phone comes bundled with 150 minutes of calls to phones off the Soyo network. Incoming calls, which also count towards your service minutes usage, require the Plus service, which costs $9.99 per month. The toll for off-network calls depends on the destination, but charges for calls to the U.S., U.K., France and Canada are 3 cents per minute while Germany is 4 cents.

When it starts up it is kind of cool to see your phone displaying the message "Booting ..." but here we hit the first of the functional issues with the G668: In our environment the phone then displayed "Wait Logon ..." followed by "Failed." Then, after it had thought about life, the universe and everything for a few seconds, the phone reported "Ready for calls".

While setup on a DHCP-enabled network is easy the same isn't true for networks with static addressing, or if you want to connect directly to a broadband modem supporting PPPoE. For these environments you'll have to configure the G668 from the device's keyboard, which requires reading the manual - here's where the product completely falls apart.

A little more money could have been spent on translation from whatever language the manual was originally written in. For example, the key "Volume+" is described in the manual as "Turn over manual backward."We pressed the key repeatedly but the manual didn't turn over.