Good quality, but a short on features
Pros:
Superb sound quality, nicely sized and shaped handset, good display, phonebook sharing, speakerphone
Cons:
No lighted buttons, headset jack, bluetooth or functional base
The Bottom Line:
I recommend it because it's DECT, excellent sound quality, very nicely priced and should satisfy all but the most demanding gadgetphiles.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
This phone is replacing our Panasonic KX-TG1000N, which is by far the best phone system I have ever owned. Replacement handsets are getting hard to find and are expensive. I have been shopping for quite a while for a system to replace it, but can't find anything I like as well. I figured it was about time to buy into DECT and just get a system that will hold me over until all the VoIP/WiFi stuff matures a bit more.
Overall, I am pleased with the quality of the phone system. The sound quality is excellent. The handset is shaped well enough to hold in one hand and dial with a thumb. The speakerphone is clear to both ends of the call. The one nice new feature is the ability to transfer phonebook entries from one handset to another. This will be a real timesaver with additional handsets. A nice side-effect is that both time and caller ID management changes are propagated to all handsets (rather than having to set each individually).
The features I am really going to miss from the Panasonic are the lighted rubbery buttons, spare battery in the base and full function base. That base acted as a full speakerphone and intercom to the handsets, which is really handy when the handsets are misplaced or dead. It also used the same battery as the handsets, which meant the system still worked when the power went out and there is always a spare fully charged battery available for a dead handset. I didn't realize there was not headset jack until I got the handsets out of the box.
There are just a couple of caveats so far. Since I bought the phone at the end of December, I immediately ran into the non-US date format issue. The phone expects dd/mm/yy and it was frustrating to be unable to set the time repeatedly. There is no useful feedback as the phone just makes a strange beep and returns to trying to set the date. Now I am just irritated that the phone will always display dd/mm, which not only looks strange, but will be confusing when looking back through past caller ID logs.
A minor annoyance is the fact that it takes 6 keypresses to delete each caller ID entry. Not only are these keypresses on 2 different keys that are not beside each other, I have to look at the screen to scroll through choices. I am accustomed to being able to delete unneeded entries in less than half the time with only 3 keypresses and not even needing to look at the screen once I decide I want to delete an entry.
If I had never owned the KX-TG1000N, I would probably never notice this phone's quirks, especially for the price. As it stands, it is a very good phone that is a stripped-down replacement for something I already had. For what it is worth, even Panasonic doesn't currently make a phone that fully replaces that discontinued one at any price. I will be watching for more feature-rich 'versions' of this phone to be released in the future.
Update 01/18/2007: I just wanted to add a comment about battery life. Since I always fully cycle batteries when new, I was pleasantly surprised when it took 7 days for one and 8 days for the other handset to start beeping after the initial charge...and this is with pretty frequent use. I didn't track exactly how long they beeped before they shut down completely, but they were both on the order of 2 days. So, 8-10 days of pretty regular use on a charge. Very nice.
The manual states that the LED on the base blinks off periodically when the handset is fully charged, but it appears to stay on constantly even after the handset has been docked for 2+ days. So far, I don't have any indication when the batteries think they are fully charged.
