Customer Reviews

Motorola MD761 5.8 GHz Digital Expandable Cordless Phone with Answering Machine and Caller ID (Black/Silver)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

I bought this phone for my second (business) line at home. I have an AT&T (VTech) phone for the house phone and this product suffers in comparison.

First the good stuff: this phone is attractive and easy to set up. The menus navigate easily and you program the base from the handset (none of this silly separate programming). The buttons and whatnot I think are better placed and the phone is nicer looking.

But...

This phone suffers from a number of limits that are annoying. The AT&T phone handsets work from throughout the house. This phone doesn't reach even half the distance before it produces noticeable static and weak reception and dies before I get to the backyard (yipes).

Battery life seems to deplete rapidly. Hour long conference calls are a test for the phone.

If you don't hold the phone directly over your ear, you can't hear it very well. The phone isn't shaped in a way to keep the earpiece centered naturally and I'm constantly having to shift the phone so I can still hear.

It does have a handset speakerphone, but the quality is fairly poor. I intend to try it with a headset.

The setup was easy, but it did take time for the programming to register with the base (confusing). Motorola's website can't seem to deal with this phone yet and it is nigh-on impossible to order accessories (like a headset) from it.

So overall an attractive phone, but you'd be much better off with the AT&T or V-Tech (they make the AT&T), which I highly recommend.

Like a lot of other reviewers I was seduced by the design and features. I've had this phone/answerer with a total of 4 handsets for about 7 months now. The voice quality has been highly variable, but most of the time it has been bad. Even the recordings on the answering machine are difficult to understand at bets and unintelligible at worst. I probably paid the price as an early adopter, so don't make the same mistake I did. Do your research and don't buy this phone.

I bought this from Amazon along with an extra handset. My kids loved the features and the retro look. But the sound was awful, dropping syllables, and sometimes whole words, of the person on the line so you had to guess what they were saying. Motorola tech support told me to move the phone away from all interference: refridgerators, stereos, lamps. Lamps? "I thought the 5.8 GHz was meant to resist interference." "No sir, these phones are very sensitive." So I found a corner of my house away from everything, even lamps. Same problem. I returned it to Amazon, losing $40 in fees and postage. Bought a Uniden 5.8 GHz at Sears that turned out to have all the features plus crystal clear sound. Even right next to the lamp!

Lately, Motorola has been making horrible phones.This is the worst phone I ever bought.

1. The battery doesn't even last for a day on standby and only about 45 mins talk time. The handset just goes dead in a day without warning.
2. The handsfree speaker phone is bad.
3. The door for the battery compartment on the base unit is almost impossible to open.
4. Usually phones sort caller-id by the time the call was received at. But this phone doesn't even list the caller id in any order.

I even exchanged the phone thinking I may have received a defective one. But the replacement turned out to be as horrible as the first. Don't waste your hard earned money on this junk.

What? No "0 star" option? That's what this POS phone system deserves.

I was seduced by its clean design and good looks, but I literally had to throw this phone and two expansion handsets away. The problems:

(1) As other reviewers have noted, the menuing system was designed by an engineer with no interface design experience. Just basic things like putting "New Entry" as the first item on the Phonebook. Duh. That wouldn't fly after even the most rudimentary user testing. And, again, as others have noted, the "sharing phonebook" functionality described in the user manual DOES NOT WORK, which makes the phonebook somewhat useless.

(2) Battery life *is* bad.

(3) After using it for about a month there was terrible static on the line, even though the phone line checked out OK. I called Motorola and they said the phone should be 10 feet from any electrical appliance to avoid static. Huh? I think every household in America has a phone in the kitchen, where *appliances* are. What a joke.

(4) When a message is left and the caller hangs up, there is a burst of loud static at the end of the message. It's incredibly annoying.

Bottom line: DO NOT BUY THIS PHONE! It's garbage that should not be available for purchase.

I have never submitted a review to Amazon before, but feel compelled to for this product because it is so bad. My husband and I bought this for ourselves in November 2004 and thought it was good. We didn't really have much time to test it out though before I bought it as a Christmas present for my parents. I bought them the base and 2 additional handsets. What a huge mistake.

The sound quality is absolutely horrible. There is so much static. We noticed it on our phone after the holidays and my parents experience the same static. No matter where you are using the phone in your house, the static is present. I am so disappointed because I bought the phone for my parents to replace their old telephones, which in retrospect are better than this one. It's hard to understand what people are saying at times because of the static. Our old Sony 900 mhz phone, which we've had for 5 years is worlds better than this phone. That phone isn't fancy, but has the most important quality for a phone - clarity. I don't have a real problem with the menus for the phone - if the sound quality were what it should be, I'd be satisfied with the phone (even though, it does have batttery problems as noted in other reviews).

Unfortunately, we are stuck with the phones having thrown away the boxes to be able to return them to Amazon and Bestbuy. I am going to start shopping for a new phone for my parents immediately.

I've had the phone for about two months, and as others have said, the sound quality is bad. Also, the sound drops out from time-to-time so we constantly have to ask the person on the other end to repeat things because we miss sylables or words. The hand set lasts for about 30 minutes before it has to be recharged.

Several times per week (sometimes per day), when the handset is replaced in the charging cradle, the base unit locks up and becomes non-functional. The only fix is to remove AC power and batteries from the base unit. Motorola customer support just keeps sending me instructions for removing the batteries from the handset, even though I've repeatedly explained that the problem is with the base unit.

I've had enough lousy products from Motorola over the last couple years that I'm finally starting to get it -- they don't make good producst anymore (I can't stand waiting for my cell phone to "boot").

There's a lot to like about this phone, but some poor design choices in the user interface make it needlessly complicated and frustrating to use.

I'm looking for a multi-handset system for my parents. They need large, well-lit buttons, good handset volume and voice clarity, and a clear and uncluttered user interface. This system gets 1.5 out of three:

The handset styling is an overgrown version of the "candy bar" style cell phones (offered, ironically, by all manufacturers other than Motorola). That aside, the buttons are well laid out, feel crisp and easy to use, and are clearly marked. The backlighting is very effective.

Unfortunately the menu system and display are not well thought out. Some examples: After answering calls, the most frequent thing you do with a phone is (duh) make telephone calls, presumably most often to the people in your phone book. Cell phone designers figured out long ago that just pressing the up/down scroll keys should put you right into the phone book - you shouldn't have to navigate a bunch of menus to get there. Unfortunately on this phone getting to the phone book to make a call requires pressing "PHONEBOOK", then pressing "SHARED", after which you're presented with the option to put a new entry into the phonebook (something you almost never do, and which should not be in the way of placing a call!). You scroll down a couple of lines and finally (whew!) you're ready to select someone to call.

As another reviewer reported, despite the manual's incorrect claim to the contrary, there is no way to move or copy items from the shared phonebook to the private ones, or to sort the items in the shared phonebook. The designers of the phone make you manage the shared and private phone books explicitly and laboriously, rather than doing the obvious thing and just allowing any entry to be marked private, but showing one integrated list on any given handset of the shared and local entries.

One more example of the small design mistakes that mar a product that had real potential: The display is of necessity very small on any phone, and so display real-estate is precious. The display on this phone can show five short lines of text. Why Motorola wasted one of them to provide a clock and calendar is beyond me. A bigger font for information I can't get from my wristwatch or microwave oven would have been a much better choice.

Last but not least, voice quality. This phone does a lot of background-noise suppression during silent periods. This can lead to a small amount of clipping at the beginnings of utterances - A small annoyance, but one that makes conversation slightly harder to understand. There is audible static in the background, but in fairness it's *very* much quiter than my Vtech 2461 2.4 GHz DSS phone system - the background hiss on that phone is pretty objectionable. However, no one would mistake the Mot system for a wired handset. Also, the max handset volume is borderline for my needs.

Bottom line: This phone is going back to the store tomorrow. It would be fine for teenagers or anyone who doesn't mind lots of menu-navigation. But it's not a good choice for someone who places a lot of importance on ease of use.

This phone's aesthetic design, ringtones, and lighting effects are awesome. It's just too bad that it flunks in a phone's most necessary area: voice clarity and reception. I returned mine and bought a Vtech that I am very pleased with. That's the second Motorola I returned due to poor sound quality.

I bought this phone and then returned it after about 24 hours. I think other reviews here have been a bit kind on the audio quality. It is terrible. The phone chops off the first portion of all incoming audio. If someone is speaking slowly it chops off the first part of each word. For someone talking faster it is only the first word in the sentence, the rest sounds OK.

Otherwise the phone is fine but the audio quality made this phone a non starter for me.