Phones that suck less
Yesterday, I took the opportunity to take my son “out” (he’s almost always wanting to go somewhere — anywhere but home it seems) and went to Best Buy. Aside from buying a remote to replace our DVD/VCR remote that magically “disappeared” a few weeks back, a wanted to replace that Panasonic phone I bought last week. It had developed a noticable buzz with one of my Sipura’s plugged into line 1. That and no where in the docs or Panasonic’s website did it suggest how “wifi friendly” the phone might be.
The vtech phone I ended up purchasing at Best Buy (a Model 20-2431) said it uses “frequency hopping,” which basically means that it notices when something else is using the spectrum and “gets out of the way.” This is much more likely to be wifi-friendly–a few other phones that do frequency hopping advertise themselves as wifi-friendly. It also has a base unit that you can dial from, use as a speakerphone, or plug a headset into and use like a normal phone. It also includes a seperate message waiting indicator light for each line. You can even expand the system with additional handsets. Kind of the best of all worlds — except it’s about twice as much as I wanted to spend. Hopefully, this phone will suck that much less…
Incidently, the higher-end cordless phones are now starting to look like cell phones with customizable graphics and ringtones. Scary…
