Snip from NYT piece by David Pogue about "T-Mobile HotSpot @Home" -- which could save you a bundle , but is only available in small test markets so far:

If you’re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you’re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.

But when it’s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always — you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features — but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.

Link to the NYT review, and here's the dedicated T-Mobile website for this product. Here's another (positive) review at ZDNet, and another at BusinessWeek. Want! (via NYCwireless)

One bummer: they're only offering two phones with this service right now -- the Nokia 6086 and Samsung t409, both clunky flipphones, $50 with 2-year contract. Apparently, the sound quality is terrific (particularly over 802.11) but they look and feel kind of lame, don't include a huge set of features, and the display kind of sucks.

Still, man, what a good landline-replacement deal this sounds like if you just want a basic phone for lots of voice and txt, and you like to hold on to those small pieces of paper with presidents' faces in green ink.

Reader comment: Alta says,

Just wanted to let you know Hotspot at home is now nationwide. Link to BusinessWeek article.

Carl Pappenheim says,

That AT&T phone sounds fantastic but sadly isn't available, say, in the UK. No matter; a few months ago I bought this: link.

Which works really well on any wifi network although it doesn't do that slick 802 to GSM switching for obvious reasons. I foresee this being the conspiracy theorist's choice however as it's pretty much untraceable if you're just on some random wifi point and, unlike the AT&T version, you're guaranteed not to switch to the (readily-triangulated) cell network.

I guarantee this will be a plot device in a Hollywood movie by late 2015.

Thomas Valley says,

T-Mobile's releasing the Blackberry 8320 in 3 weeks that will be compatible with the Hotspot @ Home service. The 8320 is simply an upgrade of the existing 8300 (or "Curve") model: Link. This hot little number does everything the top model of BB (8830) does except for GPS integration with maps, and it's smaller and lighter, too.