Is it possible to make a wifi handset to make calls from wifi hotspots? Answered

Awww - I was hoping some bright spark may have taken up the instructable ethos and designed a home made one :(

You'd still need to pay for a membership in whatever VOIP service you were using, as well as building the device.

The latter is simple from a hardware point of view. Palmtop computer that has microphone and speaker hooked to a sound port, and 802.11 wireless hardware. Doesn't take a lot of processing power (about the same as a standard cell phone). An operating system (one of the lightweight Linuxes would be overkill but probably simplest unless you want to code at a much lower level), sound and network drivers to suit, and the VOIP client to run on top of it. A simple keyboard and minimal display, and drivers for those.

Putting it all together isn't _hard_ -- just hugely time-consuming and probably more expensive than buying a used laptop or netbook and running the VOIP program on that.

They still might... I have never made too many friends on this site by saying "just buy one."