If you’re in the market for a very inexpensive VoIP phone you might want to take a look at something based on the PA1688 chipset. You can find a list of manufacturers who sell these phones (for as little as $50 I’m told) on the VoIP-wiki though the page is labeled as PA168 for some legacy reason.
After looking at a few of these phones I would never use one in a commercial installation where my preference would be for a Cisco or Polycom (two of the best) but they would be suitable as something to play around with on Asterisk at home or in a lab.
In related news I also heard about the OpenPBX fork of Asterisk. There is a little bad blood between the Digium and OpenPBX developers, essentially because the forked the Asterisk code because they didn’t want to give up the copyleft portion of the GPL license when contributing code to Asterisk (essentially prohibiting Digium from reselling or relicensing their changes). Something to keep an eye on if you’re interested in Asterisk or open source VoIP.
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