put the whole shebang onto one chip tends to be the best policy when it comes to power efficiency:-

quote:
csr plc today launched univox, a voip phone based on the company's unifi single-chip wifi technology. csr has designed univox to enable manufacturers to produce wireless phones for residential use at the lowest cost, and lowest power with up to 20 hours talk time and 400 hours standby time from typical handset batteries, using latest generation access points. csr is providing univox customers with schematics, layout and bill of materials (bom) as well as royalty-free design software.



http://gadgets.consumerelectronicsnet.c ... p?id=63738

20 hours talktime and 400 hours standby using wifi is really pretty impressive.

actually it appears to use two chips, but with a reference design price of $20 the prices for wi/fi handsets should come down to far more realistic levels.

i would not expect to see prices come down all that far. a great deal of what you pay for in a wifi phone is software and prices are high because volumes are low (compared to the gsm/cellular market). chips and manufacturing won't change that - the first copy of any software product is very expensive, after that they're cheap - the trouble is that nobody wants to pay for the first copy. the savings to use this chip set is not likely so much compared to the software needed to get it to do something useful.

if people start using this class of phone more, prices will come down "by themselves" - new chips or not.