Uniden TRU9466 5.8 GHz 2-Line Cordless Phone

After having a 5.8GHz Digital single-line Uniden system, and then a 5.8GHz Digital 2-line Motorola system (MD7081), I can say that the Uniden TRU9466 is a great phone.

The best thing about this system is the sound quality -- it really sounds great compared to the Moto system, especially on VoIP lines. Even the full-duplex speakerphone built into the base station has first rate sound quality for consumer gear. It also has a light-weight, sturdy handset, and the menus respond quickly to user input.

On the down side, there is no good way to keep handset phonebooks synchronized. You can copy the entire phonebook or individual entries to other handsets, but the copy simply adds to what the destination handset already has. In other words, there is no way to edit, delete, or replace a remote phonebook entry.

I found the fact that phonebook memory is shared with caller ID memory a little odd in the days of cheap solid-state memory. There are 100 memory locations, and the caller ID storage will grow to use whatever memory the phonebook has not. You do have the ability to store two phone numbers per contact, but with no way to label/identify them, you have no idea which phone number goes to which of the contact's phones.

My last minor complaint is that the 4-way navigation button on the handset is configured strangely. From the home screen, pressing either up or down will put you into a ringer volume configuration screen. Pressing left gets you into the phonebook where you can then start scrolling up and down. A much more intuitive system for me would have been to make the up and down functions immediately start scrolling the phonebook, and use the left function to adjust the ringer volume (Think Nokia).

In spite of these minor design flaws, I still give the system two thumbs up.