A good phone for light use with some minor problems.

Our office recently switched over to voice over IP (VOIP) and I received a new Cisco 7905G as my phone. I've used it for over 6 months now and have discovered a few things I thought I would share.

Physical Description:
The picture is correct and gives you and idea of what this phone looks like, but it is basically 7" wide x 8" length x 6.5" tall (When using the angle bracket, the phone can be laid flat and will then be approximately 2.5" tall).

The cord supplied reaches about 5-6 feet comfortable before the phone starts sliding off the desk.

There is a 3.5" by 1.25" monochrome LCD screen on the phone. This is where all your menu options are displayed. The menu options are configurable but at our office they are listed as Redial, New Call, Message and CfwdAll. The LCD screen and the four option buttons and the up and down speed dial arrow are used for navigation through the menus.

There is a red backlit "hold" button to indicate when you've placed a call on hold.

There is a backlit menu button that will stay lit while you are in the phone's main menu. Within the main menu you can choose the following options: Messages, Directories, Settings. Messages gets you into VM, Directories shows your most recent received and dialed calls along with date and time of those calls.

Settings will allow you change many settings on your phone:
Contrast, Ring Type, Network Configuration, Model Information and Status.

Installation:
The initial installation only needs to be done once per phone, even if power is lost. I won't go into the initial setup here as it will vary depending on the choices made in the network infrastructure for the VOIP setup at your location. They Network Configuration options can be locked so that end users will not accidentally change options.

The phone is powered through the Ethernet (10baseT) cable that is also the communications cable for the phone reducing the clutter of wires on your desk. Alternatively the phone can be powered by an 48V power supply from Cisco.

The phone software can be upgraded remotely so technicians do not have to go to the physical location of the phone.

My Experience:
I was a little worried of the switchover to VOIP and so far those worries were mostly a waste of time. The quality of the phone connection is excellent with no distortion of voice, even when our internet connections are slow at work. I have not experienced any dropped calls with the system.

The phone is very easy to use with the LCD screen. The screen makes navigating the menus a breeze and accessing VM is a one button effort.

Problems and Lack of Features:
The one thing that is not intuitive with the phone is the speakerphone option. There is a speakerphone on this phone, but no button to activate it. You must leave the headset in the cradle and then dial the desired number to activate the speakerphone. I have not found a way to answer an incoming call using the speakerphone. You must first answer with the handset and then place the call on monitor and use the speakerphone.

Also, say you dial a phone number using speakerphone and then pick up the handset to continue privately, you need to press the Monitor button to place the handset back in the cradle. Unfortunately the cradle is very touchy and it is easy to hang up on the caller if you don't place the phone firmly in the cradle quickly.

There is also no separate output jack on the phone where you can plug a handsfree headset into the phone.

The one big downside to VOIP phones is that when the power goes out, so does your phone system. We have occasionally lost power here and not being able to use your computer AND your phone reduces your productivity even more.

Usually the phone will automatically recover when the power comes back on, but it does not always do this. In order to restore the phone you need to unplug and replug the Ethernet cable to reset the phone. The LCD screen will not be active if the phone is not reset, so you can see the phone needs to be reset, even if the power is on, but this could lead to some missed phone calls. The VM will also not work, so if someone is trying to reach you and leave a message they will only get a busy signal.

Product Features:
The below information is taken from the Cisco product literature:

CALLING FEATURES

• Single Line/Directory Number (DN)
• Calling name and number display
• Call Waiting
• Call Forward
• Call Transfer
• Three-way calling (conference)
• On-hook dialing, Pre-Dialing, and Off-hook dialing
• Redial
• Call hold
• Call monitor (speaker-only, no microphone)
• "Messages" soft key allows access to voice mail messages
• Four Speed dials configurable at the Call Manager

NETWORK FEATURES
• Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
• IEEE 802.1q (VLAN)
• G.711a, G.711u, G.729ab audio-compression coder-decoders (codecs)
• 10BASE-T Ethernet connection via a RJ-45 interface for LAN connectivity
• Software upgrade supported via Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server
• Provisioning of network parameters through Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
• Voice-activity detection, silence suppression, comfort-noise generation, and error concealment

PROTOCOLS SUPPORTED
• Compatible with Cisco CallManager 3.3 and above, using the SCCP protocol
• H.323 Version 2
• SIP (RFC 2543)

More information from Cisco can be found here:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/phones/ps379/products_data_sheet09186a00800c835a.html

Summary:
Despite the minor problems and lack of features listed above I find this to be a good phone for my use. Anyone who does a lot of phone work will definitely want a more capable phone than this one.

This phone is also not a good choice for a line that has to be up 100% of the time, such as customer support or sales, any power loss will eliminate the VM functions.