Never thought that I would see the day when VoWi-Fi (voice-over-Wi-Fi) became the popular item that it is quickly developing into. The Feature reports that this technology is now joining up with current cell phone technology to “help” with areas that suffer from poor cell phone coverage.

The announcements have received a lot of attention. NTT DoCoMo announced its combo phone to much fanfare just a few weeks before Motorola announced its own version. Many lapped the announcements up without looking at the details: both were somewhat crippled. While they were perfectly normal mobile phones, the Wi-Fi part lost out on many of the benefits of Wi-Fi. Rather than being compatible with any Wi-Fi network, both required special hardware, making it clear that this device was really just a mobile phone that switched to a wireless enterprise PBX when in range of the office. About the only initial benefit, then, is if you happened to work in a building that has poor mobile phone coverage.