I'm 98% sure this is completely false. While there has been research into reprogrammable software radios, the 54xx units certainly don't have one of those, so I can't imagine how they'd enable phone abilities -- unless they squeezed a second radio into the unit, which I'm pretty sure they haven't. Additionally, the length of the antenna is outright
wrong for cellular frequencies, and unless they stuck another internal antenna into the unit, you'd get terrible reception.
What I'm
hoping is that this new P/N is a hardware update to address some of the issues people have been reporting. We'll find out soon enough, I suspect.
--janak