Good cordless quality & best of all Bluetooth capable ... but Pricey!

I purchased the Uniden ELBT585 primarily because it is one of the few phones that is bluetooth compatible. Working from home, I wanted to be able to use my Plantronics Voyager bluetooth headset (capable of interfacing with two phones simultaneously) for both my land line and cell phone. After doing a great deal of hunting, it appeared that Uniden was the only mainstream land line cordless phone option that offered bluetooth capabilities. Initially, I balked at the price ... even for a phone with an answering machine (and I didn't need the answering machine), the Uniden was on the pricey side ... and I was never all that impressed with Uniden in the past. But, I decided to give it a try.

While I wouldn't have purchased the Uniden for any reason other than the bluetooth capability, I was intrigued by it's stated capability of being able to program it via connection to a PC and to upload your outlook phone numbers to the phone. While it wasn't all that difficult to do the upload, it wasn't really worth it as I had to do a lot of manual fixes anyway. For example, my outlook file had area codes and phone numbers without the 1 ... so that is how it uploaded to the Uniden phone. Unfortunately, unlike my cell phone, the Uniden isn't smart enough to know when it needs to dial the area code and when it doesn't ... and when a 1 is needed. Worse, you can't simply insert the 1 in front of the phone number on the phone, you have to re-enter the entire number. That is a MAJOR pain.

The Uniden is designed to look like a cellular flip phone but that's pretty much where the similarities end. It's not nearly as user friendly as any cell phone that I've had. Quite frankly, most of the functionality isn't all that valuable to me ... you can upload a picture of the person into the address book for example just like you can on a cell phone but you need to do it via the PC. You can set custom rings from a limited selection of options which can be good to flag family members or long distance callers.

All that said, the quality of the call is good overall. It does work well with my bluetooth headset though I have to call the number and then connect the headset (unlike a cell phone which connects automatically to the bluetooth when the number is dialed). The range on the cordless phone is overall very good ... even in a lathe and plaster house, I can pretty much roam anywhere within the house and have good reception and up to 25 feet outside of the house.

So, overall, in terms of cordless phone functionality (call quality, range, etc.) the phone is generally very good. The bluetooth capability was a MAJOR plus for me. Beyond that, most of the features including pc programming are rather cumbersome at best. If you don't need bluetooth, there are probably other cordless options that offer as good of quality (Panasonic) and greater value (lower cost). The other features just aren't worth it.