351
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #65,756 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★☆
It mostly works. With a couple of issues.
I've been relying on a cordless phone system with built-in call blocking, but it only stores 30 numbers. That gets filled up in short order, and I delete them and start over. I needed something better.
And this is definitely better. I'm using it with a cable-provided phone line and cordless phone system. And it works. Mostly.
The cool thing about this system is it intercepts everything by default, and announces that if the caller is a telemarketer, to remove us from their call list. It also announces that the caller can press "0" for the call to go through. This eliminates all robocalls, and most other unsolicited calls.
After the phone number is in the device's caller ID memory, you can then whitelist or blacklist it if you choose. Whitelisted numbers go straight through without an announcement and ring the phone normally. Blacklisted numbers are simply blocked. You might hear a partial ring, but that's the end of it.
There are a couple of down sides. When a caller presses "0", only the ringer in the device itself rings. It does not ring the phone system. If you're not near the room where the device is, chances are you won't hear it. So if you're expecting important calls, it's probably best to set the device to "off" when you're not within earshot of it.
And the other is -- and this may be a fault in the particular unit I received -- the "off" position is not always reliable. More than once it has continued to block calls when set to "off." If a really important call is expected, I'll probably just disconnect the unit from the phone system completely.
Other than that, it's effective. It blocks unwanted calls.
