Good value with some Nice Features

We needed a 2 line phone for our small business. After our old Panasonic was at the end of its life. The AT&T seemed to fit the bill. The price was good and seemed to have nice features. We liked the idea of having a second handset without having to plug it in to a phone jack. You can have a total of 8 handsets if needed.

After a month of use, we are overall very satisfied. It has functioned as we needed. Set up was very easy and did not require reading the manual. The displays on the base and the handsets are nice and informative. The answering system functions are nice. Quality of the recording, both outgoing and incoming are not perfect, but not to the point where it's not usable. The battery charge port in the base is a very nice feature which we did not find in any other systems in this price range. We use the handsets till the battery is almost dead and then swap it out with the charged one from the base. We find this feature very useful. The base does not have direct access buttons for speed dial numbers. They are stored in the "memory" menu and accessed through the display. This may or may not be to everyone's liking. We do not have too many numbers programmed so it is ok for us. Also, you have to program each handset separately with speed dial numbers. Again, this was not a problem for us, but if you have a lot of numbers to program, it can be daunting. Price was also a consideration. The base unit with handset was $126 on ebay and the extra handsets were $58 on samsclub.com, making it a very good value.

Only a couple of gripes. The button usage on the handsets is not very intuitive, especially going from one line to the next. For example, if you are talking to someone on line 1 and a call comes in on line 2, if you immediately press line 2, the handset switches to line 2 but instead of disconnecting line 1, it puts it on hold. We have found this to be very annoying, especially in the beginning. We have slowly gotten used to it, but we still do this from time to time, which to me shows how unintuitive this feature is. Also, the buttons do not respond as positively as our old Panasonic. Sometimes when we type a number, we miss a few because we did not press the buttons far enough. Finally, we feel the angle of the base is too flat. When a call comes in, I have to lean forward to be able to read the display for the caller ID info. However, I do keep the phone in the upper right corner of my desk, so if you are going to keep it closer, this may not be an issue for you.