My First Experience with Conair

When I went off to college my parents got me a cheap $5 Conair corded phone. It was green and made out of cheap plastic. In fact, in order to make it look fancier than it was, it was weighted down on the bottom. Once I took off this weight, its flimsiness became more apparent. As a phone it worked properly as it should. It was surprisingly durable, which I found out after I took that weight off as the base became super light and I found myself flinging it around. Everyone else's reaction to my phone was something like, "Conair? I thought they made hairdryers?" Since I didn't even know that I didn't respond most times other than in laughter. All in all, I liked this phone. It was at the right price. I wouldn't want to buy a Conair phone that I wanted to last years and years though.


My Experiences with the TAD-1214

Last November when my wife and I moved into our new house, we found ourselves without an answering machine. I could have sworn that I had one from my old apartment back at her grandmother's house. Alas, I couldn't find it. Come Christmas, one of the presents her parents gave us was this TAD-1214 caller ID answering machine. We already had plenty of phones scattered around the house, even a couple that we didn't even bother to plug in. We thought that this was a very thoughtful and practical present.

When I first took it out to set it up, I found that setting it up the machine isn't easy without the directions. This is because all the buttons on the machine doubled as buttons to setup the machine, but were only marked for their own primary (read: non setup) purposes. That is, it wasn't clear which button switched the day of the week versus which button moved on to setting the time. However, once I read the directions, they were very clear and I quickly picked up how to setup the machine. However, before I got that far, I tried to setup the machine without reading the directions. Bad move because there's no way to go back once you setup the area code, language, the day, and time for the caller ID (not answering machine) once you turn it on. This is just one pet peeve of mine about this machine.

Another thing that I noticed was it seems that even though they are the same unit, the answering machine and caller ID seem to function separately. Case in point, the answering machine's day and time are setup in addition to the Caller ID, even though they have the same values for both. Why couldn't the answering machine use the values that the caller ID has? It makes it really inconvenient should this all reset (more on this later).

The voice on the machine is somewhat clear. Pretty good for other machines priced much less. My voice always seems muffled on the phone and luckily the answering machine doesn't make it much worse.

The unit is small and fits well on our kitchen counter. This is good because sometimes space is at a premium there.


What Does It Have?

The answering machine is digital. That is it has no tapes; all messages are stored electronically inside the machine itself. The way you know you have messages is that the play button (the real big oval button at the top) will hold its blink for a solid second before going back to its periodic rapid blinking (which it does all the time, but more on that later). The greeting that comes on the answering machine is your typical "Please leave you message after the beep." And the beep itself isn't inaudible nor will it make your ears bleed. You can create your own greeting by holding the greeting button until it beeps. You then say your message and when you're done let the greeting button it go. You can create a bland or exciting greeting depending on who you are. Me, I like you typical "Hi you have reached ###-###-#### please leav-BEEP" where I stop the greeting abruptly in the middle of the word "leave". It's funny because it usually leaves some people unprepared and my wife and I usually get a good laugh out of it when we get home. But enough of my digression. Occasionally a message will be dropped because there's too much memory taken up from either the callerID or answering machine messages. That doesn't happen often though.

The callerID only seems to store 49 messages before the machine goes haywire. It did so yesterday. I think everything's ok now, although by letting the amount of messages go up that far you can eliminate the blinking on the play button. I would suggest cleaning them off regularly though. The callerID space is a typical size. Some people claim that it's too small or not long enough. This is pretty standard though. You have buttons to go forwards and backwards through your callerID queue. The delete key is a little annoying because you have to keep pressing it instead of holding it down.


What Does It Lack?

There are many features this device could use. One of which is a button that clears off all the calls on the callerID. Sometimes the callerID would build up to like 30 entries and I have to wait a few minutes pressing the delete button over and over. There should be an easy way to just remove the all the callerID messages from the system, but there isn't.

Another feature I wish it had was some sort of battery backup just in case the power goes out for more than a few minutes. If the power just flickers, you'll be ok. However, if there's a full power outage or you accidentally unplug the device for more than 30 seconds, then you're going to lose everything. In addition you'll have to setup the machine again from scratch including both time sets and a greeting for the answering machine if you had one before. All I ask is that you can put some AA or AAA batteries in the bottom that kick in if the main source disappears.

Finally, and this is more of a pet peeve than anything. What is the blinking on the play message button for? It blinks constantly and I just don't know why. It scares you in the dark, it would confuse someone who can't discern the regular blinking pattern from the one that shows that you have a new message. What's the point? It just drove me crazy and I didn't know why it did that.


Other Comments

There are a couple other points that I didn't mention. First off, the page here is wrong. The price is not $50, but you can find it anywhere from $20-30 depending on where you go. For example Amazon.com sells this exact same thing for $22. This is a good price. Yeah, it's not the best, but for the price you get what you pay for. That is, if this is what you want. I like it more when I can get all this in one phone. If I were to get one part separate, it would be the callerID.

I hinted at this in the beginning, but this unit is fragile. I noticed yesterday that the machine must have fell because the plastic casing at the top wasn't snapped in causing the play button to be held down. This is something I come to expect from Conair. Their phone products are fragile, although I can't speak for their hair dryers. This is good for an apartment or somewhere where you're not going to settle down. If you have kids, you might have to replace this soon if a ball hits it or if it gets dropped a lot.

All in all, I like this machine. It's very good and meets my expectations for its price. It's fragile, but what do you expect for a $10 callerID connected to a $10 answering machine.

Recommended: Yes