Google Talk to be focus of Wi-Fi phones

Remember Google Talk? It’s still around. You might even be a user.

Now you can free that Google Talk from your PC. Alpha Networks of Taiwan is set to release a Wi-Fi phone equipped with Google Talk. You would, of course, be able to have conversations on this phone. Those conversations could be of the video variety. You could also have plain old IM chats. Gmail functionality would be built in as well. Some but not all of these features will be on the first phone released by Alpha Networks; others will follow in updates.

Whether these phones are worthy competitors to Skype phones remains to be seen.