8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Seems like a great phone, but you lose important features
Date of Review: Mar 24, 2007
The Bottom Line: While the pros were nice, they were heavily outweighed by the cons. Each pro was "nice to have" but not critical, while each con was significant to our daily use.
We bought this set at Target for about $120.00, and thought that it would be the greatest phone purchase at a somewhat reasonable price. And there ARE a lot of features to this phone that are fantastic:
- our primary purpose was solved because the phone is 5.8ghz instead of whatever our old set was, and we were finding that with our wireless internet connection whenever our phone would ring we'd lose the internet. We realized it was a conflict between the phone and the wireless modem. With the new phones at a higher frequency, the problem was solved immediately.
- the phonebook and caller ID are shared by all phones, so you don't have to find a particular handset to access a number you've stored in the phone
- you can actually call from one handset to the other....which especially comes in handy when I want to reach my husband upstairs without yelling.
- when you mute the phone the person you're talking to can't hear an audible "beep"
- plus it is great to have 3 handsets as part of the same set, working with any of the bases
Now that I've done the polite thing and led with the pluses of the set, here are the drawbacks that I consider actually quite limiting and frustrating:
- while you CAN call from handset to handset, the bases do NOT have a "page" button, so if you want to find a phone you still have to track another handset down to help you.....which especially sucks if you're missing more than one handset
- you can't conference call 2 outside lines......which is odd since that feature has been on most phones for a decade. It seems odd that a "newer and improved" phone would actually LOSE features.
- AND THE WORST FEATURE - especially if you're a parent with a 3 year old that likes to pick up the other extension - is that if 2 extensions are on for a call, once you turn one of them off (as in "honey pick up the other line so we can both talk to our friend and then you can hang up once you're done") the entire call is disconnected. YES, disconnected.
Overall, while this phone isn't horrible, it seems like a lot of money for having lost certain KEY features. Honestly, we would have been better off buying a cheaper set that, yes, would take away the option to put any handset on any base, but would maintain other features (especially the hanging up the call feature - which drives me nuts). Overall, not nearly the good buy I thought it would be.
