Great idea - crummy execution

I spend a lot of time in my swimming pool, and was really intriqued by this product.

I have had another Uniden phone (900mhz EX-945 "extend a phone") since the early 1990s and it still works great, in spite of having been thrown across rooms several times over the years.  Since I had good experiences with that one, I decided to buy another Uniden.

The Uniden WXI377 has good features like memory dial, redial, flash, integrated caller id and call waiting id, and an ability to switch to another channel if you are in an urban environment.  Best of all, it can fall into the pool (which it did more than once) and supposedly still work.

Those features would be useful if it really did still work.  The phone lasted about six months or so.  One day it starting making this loud squeal on the line and thats all it does now.  This did not occur on or around a day when it got wet.

During its short lifetime, I found it difficult to prop onto my shoulder like my older, larger phone.  For me it is too small.  The sound quality was never particularly good and tended to be staticy even though the base unit is really close by.  The included battery had a very short lifespan - although I fault most cordless phones with this.  Replace the factory battery with a nickel metal hydride from a battery store and you will find substantially increased performance on many phones.  Worse yet, there was very little warning when the battery was low.  My older phone gave me an hour or so from the low battery warning.  The WXI377 gives you 15 seconds or so if you cross your fingers and sacrifice a couple chickens.

I wish this had the quality of my older Uniden.