Customer Reviews

Philips CD1553B/17 DECT Series Tri Expandable Cordless Phones with Digital Answering Machine

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Great phone, love having 3 phones. Sound quality is good. Each phone can have it's own ring.

I bought this set of phones thinking that I would have the greatest ones on the market. Wrong!

Pros:
+ Nicely designed. Looks great on my living room, kitchen and office.
+ Great answering machine.
+ Good price.
+ Great battery life.

Cons:
- The sound quality could be a lot better.
- It is such a headache to make a conference call with these!
- Volume is way too low. Hardly hear the other person!!

Overall:

Would NOT buy this again. Buy some Panasonic's.

I agree with everything the other reviewer said (static, dropped calls, poor range), plus two other irritating things. 1) Answering machine just flashes when a new message is on it so you can't tell how many calls are there. 2) You can't pick up multiple handsets at the same time to speak to the other party, so both my kids can't talk to grandma at the same time. You also can't pick up one handset and yell upstairs for the real recipient of the call to pick up. The manual says there is some crazy key combination that lets one handset call the other to do this but it doesn't seem to work, and even if it did - what a pain.

What we initially thought were just problems getting used to the new format & features of the phone have turned into a daily headache. We decided to switch to this new technology to avoid the growing interference with our other cordless/wireless devices that seem to be taking over our household. Philips is a trusted brand and we have a few of their products around the house with zero problems, but for our current needs this wasn't the solution we thought it would be.

Some unadvertised features of this phone:

-Loss of your audio mid-call so you can hear the other party but they can't hear you, lasting up to 30 seconds before it came back.

-Inability to "flash" to answer call-waiting. The phone requires a special code be entered when you want to answer the other line. If you just hang up to try and get to the other call, you have to find another handset to pick up the call.

-Every ringtone is abnormal and irritating. Doesn't anyone make a normal phone ringer anymore? Who wants their phone to ring 4 times every one second?

-If you don't have the phone on the charger at all times, it actually loses the battery power that it accumulated charging all night.

-Range is significantly poor indoors. We had to place the main unit exactly in the center of the house, which was not convenient for the answering machine's sake, to even be able to use the phone in the bedrooms or the kitchen.

I am not even sure I want to exchange this for the obvious defects when the features are so problematic. Philips made this more complicated than it needed to be, unfortunately.