Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

[updated 6/17/2012. Amazon is still selling these phones, so I'm updating my rating yet again. Over the past year multiple handsets have started randomly turning off, at the most inopportune times. The phone will ring, I'll pick up the handset, press TALK, and then the phone blanks out. These devices should not be breaking after only 4-5 years. I work with computers for a living, and although they are a hundred times as complex, they last at least 10 years without a hiccup. The lack of reliability, on top of all the constantly annoying firmware deficiencies that I originally described have convinced me to get a new phone system.] [updated 10/2/10. It's now been two years, but I see Amazon is still selling the phone. It's getting more annoying with time. The phone is still the same, but I'm less patient with it. The most common issue I have is that the phones will ring, and as soon as one is picked up, the Caller ID on all the other phones becomes inaccessible. Maybe they've changed the firmware by now, but mine still ticks me off.] [updated 2/19/09. See notes below summary at bottom. It's been many months and I still can't get used to this phone] The machine is well-made, and will do the job for us. It does the basics reasonably well: answering machine, talking Caller ID. Voice quality is okay through the earpiece and via speakerphone. So don't ignore all the good things mentioned in other reviews. However, there are some serious limitations that I find maddening, especially considering the price. The answering machine is limited to about 18 minutes of recording time. In this day and age, that's pitifully low. Fine for daily use, but not for a 2-week vacation. My previous answering machine, from almost 10 years ago, has more internal memory. On top of that, when the memory runs out, it doesn't necessarily tell the caller that their message will not be recorded! The worst, most maddening annoyance: Suppose someone calls, and another family member answers the phone. You, in the other room, pick up the handset to see who called. When you press the Caller ID button, it says "System is busy...please try again later." So until your housemate hangs up, there's no way to tell who called. In fact, when someone's using the phone, you're pretty much locked out of doing anything else with the system. You can't access caller ID. You can't access the phonebook. You can't play any messages on the answering machine. If I'm on a phone call and my wife comes home, and I tell her there's a message on the machine for her, she cannot listen to it until I hang up. In only a few weeks, this one limitation has already caused annoyance and frustration. Other problems... In some circumstances, the phone displays "Missed Call" when no call has been missed. I'm not sure what causes this to happen, but all I know is that someone will call, and afterward I'll notice a "Missed call" message. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that our phones perpetually display "Missed call." There are so many false alarms that unless I've been out of the house, I find I no longer bother checking to see if, in fact, anyone's called. You can't tell from looking at the phones or base unit how many messages have been left. There is no speed dial! You can use a built-in phonebook, but it can take many keypresses to find the entry that you want to dial. The Caller ID is annoyingly slow. You don't get to see the whole Caller ID message at once. It shows the text part of the caller ID, waits a second or two, then shows the phone number. I did a test, and it takes approximately 5 seconds per entry to scroll through the Caller-ID list, if you want to see both names and numbers. The Talking Caller ID is a nice feature, but could be implemented better. Many of our calls are tagged as "Unavailable." My guess is that's pretty commonplace. Unfortunately the Talking Caller ID apparently doesn't have the word "Unavailable" pre-digitized, so it has to synthesize it in that awkward hard-to-understand computer-like voice. We're already making a joke out of it. There are a bunch of other ease-of-use issues. I won't go into all of them. A few are: * The main base unit doesn't have an LCD, which means that you can't use the phonebook from the base. Since there's no speed dial, you can only make a call from the main base unit if you know the number. * If you're on a handset and another call comes in, you can see the Caller ID - very nice. But, if you're on the speakerphone and a call comes in, the Caller ID does not display on the handsets. So you're in the dark. * The tone duration/spacing is long, and you can't adjust it. So when the phone dials a phonebook number or Caller ID number for you, it takes awhile for the number to be dialed. It's only a few seconds longer, but my previous phones never had this problem. * I was on the phone the other night, when another call came in via Call Waiting. The display lit up for only 10 seconds. By the time I had put on my glasses, it had gone black. Even though I still had time to pick up the new call, I couldn't see the display to find out who was calling. Summary: It gets the basic job done, but I'm constantly reminded of its limitations and quirks. And I need to have my old answering machine on standby for when we go on vacation. And my wife has been looking at the handsets with skepticism and trepidation, and then she looks at me. I know what she's thinking, and it's not good. Update: User 'Ricky' left some comments to my review, so here are my replies to him. My overall rating has not changed. 1) I had earlier written that when one handset answers a call, the other three handsets would display "Missed Call." Ricky said that this is wrong. At first, after I tested this feature, I thought he was correct. However, I've continued to have problems with incorrect "Missed Call" displays. 2) Ricky suggests that I can check my messages while on vacation to keep them from overrunning the 18-minute time aggregate time limit. This is certainly true. However, I marked this down against Panasonic because I shouldn't need to worry about such things while on vacation. It's a vacation. I can buy a 1GB MP3 player for $25 that holds many hours of CD-quality audio. So I don't understand why this phone can't hold even an hour of phone-quality audio, or at least as much as my digital answering machine from several generations ago. 3) Ricky commented that my comment about Talking Caller ID is misleading. I don't see how. All I meant was that they didn't bother to pre-digitize some common words (which they could have known about in advance), so the computer-generated voice is unnecessarily awkward.