In our house, we have cordless phones strewn all over the place. Mostly 2.4 GHz phones and one older 900Mhz phone, they are located at various locations throughout the house and yet they eventually all end up congregating in the same area. That is really frustrating since whenever the phones start ringing, you can never find one. Somehow I still found reasons to get two more cordless handsets into our household.
Reason#1. Eventually the 1 button wore out considerably on our Panasonic 2.4 GHz phone and now it is relegated to the basement where we don’t expect to make outbound calls from (especially long-distance ones).
Reason#2. We have a D-link wireless router for our internet access but because it operates at 2.4 GHz and I used to work from home a lot, it’d drop my connectivity frequently whenever we got a call and the phones happened to be in range.
The final straw. The last reason we ended up getting this Motorola phone was because my 15 year old cassette (yes, you read correctly, CASSETTE!) answering machine finally died. Yes, I’m pretty cheap. And don’t think I didn’t try fixing it either.
As it was, there happened to be a C51 (SD7561) dual package at the local Future Shop. Two handsets and a digital answering machine for $75. This set is also capable of expanding to 8 handsets should you ever need to do something that crazy.
Appearance
Both the base unit and handsets are constructed from a semi-hard dark grey plastic. The sides are clad with black rubber to provide grip and there's a black plastic belt clip. The buttons are made from hard plastic unlike the rubber ones on my 2.4Ghz Panasonic phones. But they feel more durable and hopefully they don’t wear out like my other phones did. The handsets are also fairly small. You can almost mistake them for older large cell phones.
Base Unit
There is an AC adapter for the base unit but optionally, you can also insert 4 AA batteries into the base unit in case there is a power outage. There’s an LCD display indicating the number of messages that are on the system, volume control for the base unit speaker, controls for setting the system time, record your announcement, and review, skip, and delete your messages. The usual toll saver and answer on/off options are also included. The digital answering machine has about a 25 minute recording capacity depending on the quality of the recording that you can program from the handset.
Handsets
The main thing I love about this system is that you can check your messages from any handset so you don’t necessarily need to find the most ideal location for your base unit for reviewing your messages. I remember when I used to press play on my old answering machine and find myself confined to that room for an extended period because some idiot left a long winded message. I could have been changing or cooking or something. When you have kids every minute is valuable. When there are any messages in memory, the blue led light on the handset as well as the base unit will flash until they are erased.
Each handset also comes with a speakerphone and headset jack. The LCD display will show you the last 5 numbers dialled as well as 50 of your last incoming calls if you have CallerID. Each handset can be customized with a name. For example, main-floor, bedroom, etc. And each handset can also have it’s own directory as well as a shared common directory. Then you don’t have to program every phone when you want to save a new number that is accessible to every handset.
Common Features
There’s a day and night time ringing option so you can set your daytime ringing volume to a different setting than your night time ring if you don’t want any inbound calls to wake up the kids, or you just don’t want to be woken up at night because you go to sleep early. There are also 15 different ring tones. When a handset is charging on the base unit, there’s a really bright blue light that you can actually disable through one of the menu options. You can also use the handset as an intercom by pressing a “connect to” button and then selecting the phone name (using our previous example of Main-floor or Bedroom as an example). You can also use this button to transfer incoming call between handsets. I just find it easier to yell to the other person to pick up the phone.
Range
Usually this isn’t too important these days with the advent of higher frequency cordless phones unless you live on a property with lots of acreage (and we don’t) but as a test I ventured outside to see how far I could still make a reasonable call from and 300 feet was not too farfetched. Within the house the sound quality of the handset is terrific – almost no difference from a corded phone.
Sole Complaint
There is no visual battery indicator on the LED except when the battery is low! Perhaps there’s one on the optional colour display. Basically you don’t know when you’re almost running low on battery until the handset beeps. Then you pretty much want to rush off and find another phone.
Conclusion
Aside from that one complaint, it has all the features I need and some I wasn’t expecting to have but I’ve found to come extremely convenient. I will update this review whenever I find something new, but overall I feel like I have something that should have costed a lot more.
50-name and number call waiting caller ID (activation required) Voicemail message forwarding 15 selectable melodic ringtones and customizable rings fo...More at Amazon Marketplace
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