At Belkin's product extravaganza today, we also saw a demo of its new Wifi Skype phone. It's a neat black unit the size of a mobile phone, and designed to look as much like a mobile phone as possible, complete with annoyingly tiny keys. It's Skype-only, so you're going to have yet another device to carry around in your pocket.

Still no firm launch dates or prices, although Belkin did say we should be able to get our hands on one 'soon'. At the moment it's on pre-order in the US for around $170-190. Battery life is expected to be fairly standard (i.e. poor) for a Wifi device - perhaps a couple of hours talk time, although Belkin weren't sure of the actual figures - apparently it's only us rebels in Europe who worry about such mundane details.

As an aside, we got to wondering why standalone Skype phones that don't need your PC to be turned on are taking so long to appear. Perhaps it's something to do with Skype being a peer-to-peer service that relies heavily on utilising the PCs of Skype users for call routing and user directories. If every Skype user fired up a standalone Skype phone and turned their PCs off at once, there wouldn't be much left for it to work with...

UPDATE: We've just noticed that Belkin and Netgear have been pipped to the post by the Edge-Core Skype Wifi phone, which is now on sale from Expansys for £129.95