Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After my local phone company crosswired the DC on my phone line and fried the phones in my home, I had to replace the stalwart GEs that I had had for years, speakerphones that just plain worked. I checked reviews and decided the AT&T CL2909 was a good option for one of the phones I needed to replace. Boy, are some of the reviews of this phone WAAAAY off. This thing is an engineering catastrophe. Every function on this phone, save for the basic function of actually dialing a number and talking with another human over the handset, WILL NOT WORK unless four AA batteries are installed! Considering that all landline phones draw DC power by default, how is it possible that this phone can't tap any advanced functions without batteries installed? My old speakerphone used one AA to keep numbers in memory alive should there be a power failure, yet even the speakerphone function on this AT&T will not work unless all four batteries are installed. Here's the FAIL list if the user does not install batteries: Memory backup Caller ID Menu functions Mute LCD display Speakerphone Clock Directory Hold Redial Flash CALL INFO light That's a joke. Worse, the box veils the truth by playing up that this phone does not need AC to run. Well, neither did my old GE speakerphone, as only one of its functions depended on batteries, not most all of them. An addendum inside the AT&T box tells the sad truth about what leaving the batteries out means. And yes, I removed the batteries as a test, and this phone's advertised strengths vanish. The manual doesn't even get this lack right, insisting the display works without batteries when the handset is lifted. Again, tests reveal this to be wrong also. Obviously, battery consumption will be huge with this phone. That's a joke, too. This is supposed to be a desktop/wall-mountable unit. But hanging it on a standard wall mount reveals two maddening problems: The backing plastic is thin and doesn't make for a tight connection, so the phone wobbles on the wall mount, plus the LCD display angle shifts so badly it becomes unreadable, no matter the lighting. No amount of contrast adjustment fixes that LCD-readability problem, either. (The Amazon.com picture of this phone implies it has a helpful greenish backlighting, but no backlighting exists. No doubt AT&T supplied the image.) Do I even need to talk about the clipping when the speakerphone volume is raised? Should I mention the clicking heard by people on hold? If this phone had been released in 1980, some of these problems could be excused. But for this phone to be so much worse than a phone I purchased 10 years ago is reprehensible engineering. It doesn't matter what the cost, I'd pay twice as much for this phone if it matched what my old GE could do. That it claims to and yet fails so miserably is frustrating to the nth degree. I've reviewed a couple hundred products here on Amazon.com, and I've got to believe that only the sonic mosquito deterrents are worse products than this utter piece of techno-rubbish. It's as if AT&T never asked a human being to use this phone so as to get actual product feedback. That so many purchasers of this phone on Amazon gave it good reviews is baffling when it fails on such simple levels.