I purchased this unit in June 2005 at a large department store for about 25$US. I needed an answering machine for my home office. The unit seemed functional and is very compact. The manual was easy to read and informative. The unit provides both English and Spanish prompts.

The setup was a little tedious but not too bad. When I called in remotely I was impressed how fully the unit's features were exposed to me from the road. Remotely, I could check messages (of course), erase messages (more about that below), listen to my greeting, change my greeting, leave myself a message, change my security code, and turn the answering on/off. Pretty cool.

Unfortunately, the unit has a very, very significant disadvantage: It doesn't take messages very well. The speaker is routinely cut off in mid sentence after a few seconds. In addition, the sound quality is horrible. The quality is so poor that it's sometimes hard to decipher what the caller is saying ("Oh, you wanted a DUCK.. not a truck?"). For any professional, the poor sound quality of the outgoing message screams ... well, "poor quality."

One other problem: when you are remotely listening to your calls, you can only erase all your messages. And you are not prompted to confirm their deletion.. hit that delete button by accident and you are OUT OF LUCK ... all your messages are gone. Since the main reason to call in remotely is to listen to your messages, the poor granularity of the delete function is a severe drawback.

Recommended:
No