Telephone Reviews

I agree with the comment of hitting the on/off button when talking. This phone also does not hold a charge for very long. I could live with these faults but not the one I'm experiencing now. The phone will not charge at all. I'm about a month out of the warranty and this phone will not charge when put on the base. The battery is almost dead and I'm going to have to throw the phone away. Useless. I would not recommend this phone.

Ditto other poor reviews. Worst problems with phone is that you can't hold phone between cheek and shoulder or it will terminate phone call. Wife wants to throw it out. Also battery life miserable...keeps telling me it needs to be charged after receiving a full charge even though it has a new battery. Otherwise has some good features.

I really love this phone. I've had it for a few years and have never had any problems with it. No lost calls, no charging problems, nothing. This phone works great.

I agree with the comment of hitting the on/off button when talking. This phone also does not hold a charge for very long. I could live with these faults but not the one I'm experiencing now. The phone will not charge at all. I'm about a month out of the warranty and this phone will not charge when put on the base. The battery is almost dead and I'm going to have to throw the phone away. Useless. I would not recommend this phone.

Ditto other poor reviews. Worst problems with phone is that you can't hold phone between cheek and shoulder or it will terminate phone call. Wife wants to throw it out. Also battery life miserable...keeps telling me it needs to be charged after receiving a full charge even though it has a new battery. Otherwise has some good features.

I really love this phone. I've had it for a few years and have never had any problems with it. No lost calls, no charging problems, nothing. This phone works great.

Major complaint - this product should have an A/C adapter, but does not. It uses two AA batteries, which need to be replaced every two days. This is simply not a practical design. Since the sound quality is good with fresh batteries, I would stick with Plantronics, but I would go up the model line until I got one with a direct power source A/C adapter.

The headset works fine, unless you're in a call center or other such environment where you have other people "feeding" you information on what to say while on the telephone.

I was on with a client who decided to ask some difficult questions. My supervisor happened to be monitoring the conversation and proceeded to "feed" me what to say to handle these questions. It turns out that the client has heard EVERYTHING that my supervisor was saying. Of course, I lost the deal. I come to find out later that this headset (as is the case with most cheaper headsets) will allow ALL communication through to ALL of the parties involved.

So if you're in a situation where people MAY feed you information while you're on the phone, DO NOT BUY THIS HEADSET or other cheap versions. Other than this incident, it works fine -- good quality sound etc...

Overall for not having to buy an amplifier, this set works really good. After seeing mine, our clerk bought one too. Our office has a cheap AT&T multi-line phone system. I bought two others before I found this one that works. At one point,I thought I had a problem with the microphone but I just needed to change the batteries. I did find this product for a cheaper price at another site, but I trust buying from Amazon. They are accurate, and prompt.

Difficult to program, terrible display and little small buttons that are hard to read.

Voice quality is good, and size is good. But I definitely wouldn't recommend this phone.

So I bought this phone for my parents and they have an AT&T digital answering machine. With this phone hooked up near it, it caused a loud screeching and whining sound in the answering machine (recording and playing messages). After calling Uniden, their tech support said that this model phone was not compatible with an answering machine. What the problem is (after some testing) is that if the power pack (or the phone power pack combination) is plugged in near other devices, it causes interference with them. With the phone and answering machine plugged into different ends of the house (different electrical outlets and different phone jacks), everything worked fine. Even when taking a very long phone cord and having the phone line go through the answering machine, but plugged into different electrical outlets, it was fine. When plugged into close electrical outlets, there was interference. The closer the outlets, the more interference. There is no place that mentioned this and tech support at Uniden pointed out the section in the manual that said "Keep away from other electrical devices." They said that means that it can't be used with an answering machine. I was very disappointed. If you have no answering machine, and never plan on having one, it worked ok otherwise.

I've had this phone for about 2 years and have found many problems regarding charging. When I first got it, I found that it was wise to recharge the phone every night by keeping it in it's cradle, or it would not work the next day all day, but it didn't take very long to charge. The sound quality is excellent and it is comfortable to use and press the buttons. The charging problem got progressively worse and worse, so now I'm looking for another phone for my bedroom. I have this same model for our downstairs phone and haven't had any problems. That one is about 4 years old and I've had no problems with it at all. I think the Uniden quality on this went down.

I ended up returning this item because after many, many calls to tech support and numerous calls to my phone company, it was finally determined that my win modem wasn't compatible with this product...bummer!

I bought an HC3000 a few years ago, and I've never been online without it since then. there are a few kinks to it, but they most often stem from your telephone and internet provider or settings.

It always perfectly rings twice (and only twice...LOUDLY!) when someone is calling while online. It slows my connection for about 5 seconds during the ringing, but it's nothing to gripe about, you can only expect so much from a phone line at once. If you choose to answer it and talk for more than a few seconds you will lose your internet connection, but it does its job perfectly when it comes to not missing a call.

The only drawback (lost a star for this) is the lack of Call-Waiting-ID support it's supposed to have. I could never get it to show with the external box I bought, and the phone I have connected has CWCID as well. I'll be upgrading to the 4000 model with the built-in display box and see if that works with my setup.

compared to not having one of these, having to choose betweeen either disabling call waiting and giving every caller "the busy signal" or getting kicked offline when anyone calls, this is an essential accessory for any dial-up user.

BTW: The only difference between the 2000 and 3000 model is the added optional Call-Waiting Caller-ID feature of the 3K, and the color of the unit. both of them were sold at the same time, but the 3K was a bit more expensive than the 2K.

We've used the HotCall box for several years now & wouldn't be without it! Granted there are a few improvements that could be made (the ringer is LOUD with no volume control & only the phone connected to the box can answer, so if you're in another room R-U-N), but overall this product has served us well. Only occasionally am I knocked offline even after hanging up from an answered call within the 10 seconds allotted. I think that problem stems more from the telemarketer on the other line NOT disconnecting right away rather than from the HotCall box not reestablishing my web connection. We are constantly telling people about the box after getting a busy signal while they've been on the web. It's certainly worth the money we paid for it & cost us a lot less than a 2nd 'internet dedicated' phone line would run a month!

Sleek design, nice colors, practical mute button and in-line volume control as well as two jacks. But I plugged this thing into my laptop and even with all volume controls maxed out, I could hear someone humming in the room. Where is all that powerful sound they were braggin' about ? Maybe that's just me. The other flagrant thing is that the rigid behind-the-head thing is way too wide for me eventhough I have a big head. Hence the headset will slide to rest on the back of your neck with the microphone poiting to the ceiling. Gets on my nerves.

This headset has really good sound on the mic and also on the headset. But it's very uncomfortable to use. It's always slipping because the headset is not adjustable. I returned mine for a .90 Plantronics model.

I got this headset for Chrsitmas, and I have not been dissapointed.
I use this headset for gaming, because I play counter-strike. I must say that the behind-the-head design is very comfy, even though
I have a smaller head. I have had this headset for over three months, adn I must say that they are not damaged at all. Just try to avoid crushing the headset! In my experiance, the microphone works very well, and the sound is great. This product is a great bang for your buck!
I give this product 4 stars because of one flaw.. If you bump the mute control where the volume is, it is likely that the volume will change drastically by getting caught on your chair. This has happened many times in my experiance, but overall I highly recommend this headset, and I think that it is well worth the price.

My wife and I dislike two key functions of this phone. First, the answering device has very poor sound quality. No matter how clearly I enunciated, the greeting message would always sound dreadful. Second, there was a strange reverberating buzz every time I spoke. Changing the volume did not affect the buzz. I wonder these quality defects are correlated with the reduced price and the offer of free shipping?

The features on this phone are great, but there is an echo in the receiver that makes it intolerable. We sent it back.

I am a new user to Amazon and didn't realize that there was a review section. I ordered the Toshiba SX2980 not knowing that it had bad customer reviews. When I learnt of the review section and read the comments I tried to cancel my order, but the order had already been processed. I received the phone fully expecting to return it the same day. However, since trying the phone, I have had no problems with echoes or time delays. The features are great and the sound quality is excellent. I would not have ordered this phone based on the reviews, but I'm very glad I did.

I bought this product months ago and it has been nothing but trouble, it screechs whenever you try to pick up the handset from the base. This is very difficult to handle. V-Tech has the worst telephones i have ever seen. From everyone I know that has a V-Tech product has had serious difficulties with it, and end up throwing it out. Also have you notice how short V-Tech products are on the market?

After having bought a Panasonic cordless 2-line phone for my teenage daughter for about $160, I decided to save some money and get this Vtech phone for the kitchen for about half the price. I am sorry. The features work OK, but the sound quality is very disappointing. Our family of five uses the phone a lot, and my father-in-law is hard of hearing. He can't understand us from this phone.

When I started with my most recent employer, I was expected to set up a home office (the HQ was in MA). So I headed out to OfficeMax and started picking up office supplies. One of the things I was going to need was a two-line phone. After browsing for a while, and finding that the prices were all over the map, I settled on a lower-cost phone that seemed to have all the basic features I needed.

The VTech 9241 was the phone I expected, but with a little less quality than I wanted. The first major problem to pop up was the charging of the handset. When in it's cradle, I had to make sure it was seated just right to make the contacts touch, and charge the handset. I couldn't just plop it back into the main unit. And how did I find this out? When I went to use it and found out it was dead. There is a charging indicator, but it's a dim LED underneath a shiny smooth piece of plastic that houses some of the function buttons. In the end, this makes all three LED's that are underneath it (power, charging, spare batt) almost impossible to see from any distance away.

So okay, I know to watch carefully for the charging light. But since I had to wait for my handset to charge, I had to use the speaker phone, and that's where I found the next problem. The speaker phone is ultra sensitive. Even the slightest whisper set it off. And when the speaker phone hears something, it stops playing the incoming audio. This means that I have to sit perfectly still, and not make a whisper when I'm on a conference call using the speaker phone or else I'll miss out on what the presenter is saying.

Finally, when my handset was charged back up, I found that it's transmission quality was mediocre at best. There's lots of pops and clicks, and distant static - and that's when using only one line. I give presentations over the phone to hundreds of people in a single sitting, and static that distracts from my presentation is seriously disturbing.

But I can't say the phone hasn't served it's purpose. I use the various features, mute, memory, etc. often. The volume control for controlling the volume of incoming audio on the speaker is easily accessible (although when I push the button I get no incoming audio on the speaker because I just made a sound). The handset has a similar volume control on right where the thumb goes which makes this easy to control as well. The belt clip and headset work great in place of the speaker phone, for giving presentations as you walk around the house.

The one feature it doesn't have on the handset is a mute button - that is only on the base unit. I'm not sure I understand this, and would use this feature often. All the other functions are available on the handset - why not mute?

So if you're just conducting regular business calls using this phone, it's great. But if you're expecting a little more - shop a little more.

I was shopping for a new phone today to replace this ..., and stumbled across these reviews. Glad to see it's not just me who is having problems with this phone. It looked like a great deal when I bought it, but mine suffers from all the same problems outlined by numerous reviewers already. It "loses" the handset, even when you pick it up right from the base - frequently, you have to hang it up again to let it reset before you can answer the phone. When the power goes out, even for a second, you have to pull the power cord out and remove the backup battery to get it working again, erasing all your messages and settings - so much for having a backup battery! Also, the sounds quality is poor compared to my cordless Lucent and Panasonic phones.

Do yourself a favor and take a pass on this phone.

I have owned this phone about 5 months now. I have had complaints from others about outbound sound quality at times. May biggest frustration is that when the handset is on the base and a call comes in, if you pick up the handset and try to answer too quickly, the handset seems unable to find the base and I end up having to answer/conduct the business call on the speakerphone, at least until I can hang up the handset and let it "resest" itself, synching up the security code I would guess. The answering machine is very versatile, but the battery backup doesn't seem to save messages when the power goes out, only the memory dial numbers! What good does that do?

Would keep looking....

This phone is great. It is clear and works great. It is also the only phone out there with this mix of features.

My one problem is that to make the battery life last REALLY long you have to turn off the ringer which means if you lose track of it you can't use the intercom feature to find it.

Thus I have lost the handset and now have to but a new one since nobody seems to sell just the part which I have spent hours searching for and making phone calls to everyone.

PS [With the cost of the handset] I may as well buy a new phone....

This phone is obviously a cheaply made product. It yet again proves that you usually get what you pay for.

This phone has horrible sound quality -- conversations are turned to "huh?", "what?"... after 8 months of wrangling with VTech, they finally sent me a 2468 model which is MUCH better sound quality. I wouldn't buy another 9161 if my life depended on it!

Stumbled across this product as another VTech product was in the daily Gold Box offerings. I have had mine for well over one year now, and was surprised to see a few less than favorable reviews for this model. I have had absolutely no problems with mine here in Korea--and it shares the phone line with a DSL modem---and thus is filtered to allow data and voice--no problems at all with sound quality. Perhaps some with funny sound may want to try relocating the unit--that may help. Overall---for the price--I think you will be hard pressed to find a better value anywhere.