Costs more, but you get more
Written: Oct 14 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Chock full of features, great sound quality and range, cool looks, wall mountable
Cons: Tiny handset may be TOO small for some, expensive if you pay list price
The Bottom Line: If you can find this phone for $200 or less, it's a bargain! Feature-full, great sound, great quality. Truly worthy of the "Elite" name.
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| slionel's Full Review: Panasonic KX TG2670 2.4 GHz 1-Line Cordless Phone |
My mission: find a good quality cordless phone for a new house my wife and I are building "in the country". Requirements from my wife: easy to use, wall mountable, built-in speakerphone, long range (so she can take it with her outside), decent answering machine. I also wanted headset compatibility (having grown to love this feature of my Panasonic KX-TC1870).
My wife thought that some of the other Panasonic cordless phones, such as the KX-TG2570S, looked cool ("like a Transformer", she said), it was the KX-TG2670N that caught my eye for its full complement of features AND the $150 price after rebate when I bought from Crutchfield! This made it a tremendous bargain compared to most other phones.
Of course, Epinions was my first stop to read reviews, and I found some of them puzzling - especially those that said you couldn't adjust the ringer volume on either the headset or the base. Funny, my KX-TC1870 has that feature, and a look through the manual Panasonic makes available through their web site confirms that the KX-TG2670N did too.
I was also concerned by the comments about interference from microwave ovens, since the phone would be located in the kitchen. But since Crutchfield offers no-hassle 30-day returns, with free return shipping (and my order got free shipping as well!), why not try it for myself and see?
A couple of days later the phone arrived - I wasn't quite prepared for how small the handset is. I am not a cell phone user, and have big hands, so I worried that it would be TOO small. But in practice, it works ok - I had no trouble adapting to it, and my wife likes it too.
I programmed the answering machine (same as my TC1870 - quite straightforward) and set about to try out the phone in as many ways as possible. First stop - the microwave. I put a cup of water in the microwave, turned it on, and placed a call while standing right in front of the oven. While I could hear a slight degradation in the sound, it was nothing obvious, and if I walked a couple of feet away, the degradation disappeared. (The base unit was about 30 feet away in another room.) The sound quality itself was fantastic, as I have come to expect from Panasonic phones.
The handset speakerphone was a new feature to me, and I love it! It makes waiting on hold for customer service ("Your call is very important to us - please hold.") almost a pleasure.
If you subscribe to Caller ID, which I don't, the TG2670N has a bundle of features that enhance its use. For example, you can set it to recognize certain callers and the phone will ring differently and the flashing LED on the handset (another feature I love) flashes a different color! Caller ID is also integrated with the directory, making it easy to save and recall caller names. If you have Caller ID, you'll have fun with this.
Some of the additional touches which are so nice to live with: you can pick up the handset but dial on the base unit and you can set the unit to automatically answer when you remove the handset from the cradle during a call. Those of you with a pager (not I) can have the phone call your pager when a message is received, with the Caller ID number sent as the "message". (You can also program the TG2670N so that your family can push a couple of buttons and have it call your pager, with your home phone automatically identified, so you know to call home.)
Curiously, the requirement for wall-mounting knocked a lot of otherwise attractive phones out of consideration for me - many of them require sitting on a flat surface. The Panasonics have a rotating cradle that allows use on both a table and a wall. It's a neat design that more phones should have.
I don't think I would pay $300 for this phone, but the $150 I paid (or even $200) makes it a real bargain. You get a lot of features, and a lot of quality - I haven't seen another phone that can beat it.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
slionel
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Location: Nashua, NH, USA
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Father, software engineer, cat-shelter volunteer, technology fan
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