Customer Reviews

Siemens 2420 Gigaset 2.4 GHz Complete Cordless Communication System

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(64)

 

 

Overall, this seems to be an excellent system.

First, let me correct a few inaccuracies in the other reviews.

Mr. Mehlman states that you can't repeat or skip messages in the answering system remotely. The manual clearly states that you can. He also claims that you can't play back messages from the cordless handsets, but the manual also says that is possible.

Mr. Szymonik and Mr. Doumet both claim that you can't transfer phone directories between the base and handsets, but I have done just that.

What don't I like? First, there are no voicemail boxes in the answering system. Each line can answer separately, but you can't have boxes for different people on the same phone line.

Second, while you can control the ringing frequency and volume for calls placed to different lines and the intercom, you can't change the ringing pattern. I would like one long ring for Line #1, two short rings for Line #2, and three shorter rings for the Intercom, for example.

Third, the desk unit handset is so sleek and rounded that it's difficult to hold between your ear and shoulder.

Fourth, the phone's user interface isn't intuitive at times or even consistent. For example, to add a new entry to the directory or send the directory, you hit the Dir button, then have to select a name, then scroll through the action list to find the appropriate action. Selecting a name should not be required for global actions.

As another example, to page another intercom station from the handset, the menu shows the extension number and part of the name, but to send a directory to another station, you must enter the number without seeing the names.

However, except for the lack of voicemail boxes, these are fairly minor issues, and should not detract from the review.

First of all, I also feel obligated to correct some inaccuracies in others' reviews. I didn't like reading these reviews that give the system a bad rating because of supposed shortcomings when the shortcomings aren't there!

Yes, you can transfer directories (have done so), and yes, you can access your messages from the cordless handset (including to repeat and skip messages) - hit INT 9, it's on page 58 of the manual and it works. Transferring calls between base and cordless is also not that complicated! Plus, the manual has quite an extensive index, so finding whatever it is you're having trouble with is a snap (like that thing on page 58). As for the ringing, you can change the pattern on the cordless handet even though they term it as pitch, going through the choices will change the actual ringing pattern. True, oddly, this can't be done on the desk station. I've turned mine completely off, since I know where it is, and rely on the cordless handset's ring to inform me which line is ringing.

The one significant drawback I did discover was that when calling in to check for new messages, both lines are treated as one, in other words, if I would like to call in and check for new messages left only on "Line 1" I am given any new messages - for Line 1 or Line 2. This may or may not be important to others but it seems that mailboxes would have been a smart and easy design feature to include. This is not so important to me but really should be part of an answering system like this.

Overall, though, there are so many easy-to-use features, the system is powerful, flexible, sounds great, looks great, and while the base handset feels a little light, the base and cordless units feel great, buttons and such. If the mailboxes are important to you or your business, you're out of luck, but aside from this flaw, I feel the system is 5 stars.

I own 2 of these phones and 6 handsets - bought them all at once for my home/home office. It is definitely the sleekest looking phone out there. However, for paying top dollar, it has some serious design flaws. To cut to the chase:

Pros:
- Beautiful design.
- Handsets are light and easy to handle.
- Range seems very good and voice quality is very good.
- Adding handsets is easy and convenient - no jack required.

Cons:
- Cannot pick up a call from a handset after the answering machine has picked up (no call interrupt).
- Cannot use other-brand external phones to join a call in progress.
- When power is lost or unplugged, base phone loses time and date requiring reprogramming. VERY annoying and I cannot believe they overlooked this. The phone has a backup battery for crying out loud.
- Answering machine does not recognize hang-ups resulting in lots of blank messages.
- Transferring a call from one handset to another is a MAJOR pain requiring a bunch of keypresses. VERY poorly designed and non-intuitive.
- Too easy to accidentally delete a new phone message if you press delete a bit too late.
- Handsets are small and light, but not ergonomic or well designed for fitting to your hand.
- I had two handsets die within about 4 months. Questionable quality.
- Simple things like changing the volume on a handset during a call is very awkward and requires scrolling through a series of menus, so you can't change the volume without taking the phone away from your ear for about 10 seconds. Poor design.
- Virtually everything is menu driven and requires a series of button presses and scrolling through menu items. Awkward.
- Too many features are password protected on the base requiring entering a PIN every time. Is this really necessary?

There's more minor flaws and annoyances, but for the price I would expect a MUCH more user friendly design. Whoever designed these phones was probably a "tecchie" - scrolling through screenfuls of menu options is ok for software, but not for cordless phones. Many often used features should be incorporated into buttons rather than menu items (like the handset volume).

The number one thing that annoys me is trying to transfer a call to another handset. If I pick up a call one one handset, my daughter can't simply yell from another room, "I got it", then simply press talk on her handset. No - it's a series of button presses, etc. and about 75% of the time it doesn't seem to work or the call gets lost. Totally totally annoying and an inexcusable design flaw in my opinion.

Overall, for the money you can do much better. If I was able to get my money back I would in a heartbeat. I'm stuck with a $1000+ phone system which is a real letdown overall.

At least it looks nice.....

I read through most of the reviews on this product, and I have experienced many of the problems/annoyances that people have addressed. Thanks to the newsgroups I found that I had purchased the initial release. The newer release solves many of the annoyances, but battery life still suffers and range would depend on the environment.

The old version is commonly purchased as a refurbished unit... The new version has a red/silver and black box, and has been offered since the 1st or 2nd quarter of 2000.

Here is a summary of problems people have written about, that were corrected in the new version:

Power outage - If your power goes out you will not lose your messages, directory, pin code, etc. I've had my set unplugged from the wall for about an hour, and the only thing lost was the date/time. You can reset this yourself, or when a call is received, it will take the date/time from the caller ID.

Directories - The new version of the phone allows you to transfer directories from the handset to the base and vice versa.

Transfer/Pickup of calls - On the old version, you had to transfer a call from one handset to another. You could not pickup a line that was in use. This was particularly annoying when you had both Siemens phones and regular phones in the house. The new version allows you to join a line, which overcomes this problem.

Now to address other problems, I have never had problems with calls dropping unexpectedly when in range. We've been able to take the phone out of the house and almost a city block away. Like a digital cellular phone - you don't get static, you just lose the call. Also, I've never had a problem with going out of range >in< my house. I live in a typical ranch, with the base at one end and have used the handset at the opposite end.

Call quality has usually been good, and very few times I had a garbly effect like that which you would experience on a digital cell phone. Running the microwave usually caused this problem. Otherwise, I have 2-line GE ProSeries speakerphones in the kitchen and bedroom, and I've been told that the Siemens speakerphone and handsets sound much better than the GE's.

I've used this phone while working on my laptop, which has a wireless network card that operates on the same frequency. I can hear a slight intermittant popping, which is apparently when the spread-spectrum overlaps the other devices signal. But, both devices remain usable.

The answering machine and caller-id work great. You can access the answering machine with the handset or remotely, and you have complete control over replaying and deleting messages. The annoying thing is that the numbers you need to press to do simple things, like play a message, don't make sense. When calling remotely, the voice prompting's first selection is to change the outgoing message. When the heck would I want to do that? But, once you read the book and memorize the buttons, accessing your messages is a breeze.

The handset has a headset jack and a belt clip. I've plugged a headset in and clipped the phone to my pants, and off I went gabbing on the phone while doing housework, etc. (The base has a headset jack too.)

The battery life sucks, honestly. That is my biggest complaint. As long as you put the phone in the cradle every night, you shouldn't have a problem. You can also purchase additional batteries, which can be charged in a special compartment in the cradle, but changing the batteries is clumsy.

The other annoying thing is when I receive a call and put it on hold, and then answer it with a non-Siemens phone. I noticed that the call never goes "off-hold" on the Siemens, and there is a "holding tone" that continues to play in the earpiece until the call is released from the Siemens.

I've had the new version for about 7 months. It's not perfect, but I'm not disappointed. It's lightweight, full of features like caller-id with name on the handsets, and I can setup a handset as a baby-monitor. You can also call other handsets internally on the system, like having an intercom system in your house. Realize that this system is like having a business-class telephone system in your house, and business phone systems don't cooperate with regular phones either.

My overall impression is: mixed.

I have used these phones for about 6 months now, and while I don't know the actual history of these phones, I suspect they were designed by two separate groups: the base unit and then the handset unit. They show the classic problem of a marketing forced integration after the fact.

Case in point, and why I guess some of the reviewers claim the phones synchronize with each other while others claim they don't. Both phones have a common memory size, but the architecture is different. Specifically, the word size in the handset units are different than the word sizes in the base unit. So you can record a phone message of say 32 characters in the desk unit (name plus number), while the word width in the handset is only 2/3 the size of the desk unit. Normal names/numbers are fine, but when you get into long names/numbers you get into the issue of where an entry which works with one unit will not fit into the other. A classic mechanism of how this can happen is where you have entered a long distance business number (11 digits) which gets you into a voice mail system, then you set up some pauses until the voice mail asks for the extension (typically 6-8 "P"s), then the extension (another 4 digits or so). The whole purpose of this is so that the auto dialer gets through the voice mail and goes directly to the person's extension. Works fine with the base unit but there are actually some numbers you can enter on the base which can't be entered in the handsets. I am an engineer, and this is very stupid for this kind of thing to happen.

To compound this, it gets worse. While the base unit memory is wide, the handset's memory is long. The memory map is such that you can actually enter more names in the handset than you can in the base. So if you have a memory array which fills the handset and you try to synchronize to the base, the download will fill until the base if full and then give you a non-descriptive error message (communication's error).

To me one of the greatest strengths of this product is the synchronization between base and handsets, and when this works it works well. It allows you to load addressees in one phone and then replicate them to all the other phones. Except when you get close to the limits of memory wherein the base is different that the handsets. And how close do you have to get to the end? My handset has a utilization of 56% (meaning 44% free), and I overflow the base unit. Big problem.

I suspect that they have siphoned off directory memory for answering machine memory. The problem is that with a $400 product there is no excuse to not have added enough and separate memory in the first place.

The handsets come with NiCd batteries. Again, with a $400 system I think this is cheap. No excuse not to have included NiMH.

There are very subtle user interface issues which I think should have been resolved. If a number is busy, there is no way to automatically redial the number until completion. If you are on the phone and another call comes in, you answer the new call and transfer the new call to another phone, you actually transfer the new call and the old call (which remains on hold and to which there is no obvious way to retrieve it). A very nice feature (like my cellular phone) is a keyboard lockout so you don't accidentally press a button (you pulse the power button for this mode). But, this only works if there is no call going on. Try it during a conversation, and you turn the phone off. Make sure you have a UPS on the base station. If power goes off, you loose your answering messages and/or the phone locks up. To restart, you have to reset and redo all configuration options. Using FLASH ROM or a battery back-up would have prevented this (like most sub $100 phones these days), but not the $400 Siemens. There are many other issues like these which sound esoteric until all of a sudden they happen on you. In short, the user interface needs some work.

On the positive side, there are many things the phone does very well. The sound is as close to a corded phone as I have seen in a portable. Many users have complained about distance, and I agree that the distance is no greater than the 900MHz phones. However it is also no worse. I get about 50 feet outside with the base unit inside. [Remember those 1500 feet Panasonic adds, forget it. Maybe if you add an external linear.]

All in all, the handsets are very nice portable phones. However, the product in its current form is a nice first effort which ultimately remains flawed due to numerous inconsistencies and engineering aberrations. The product was good enough that I couldn't quite bring myself to return it, but frustrating enough that I cannot give it my wholehearted recommendation.

First off, I want to like this phone. The clarity of the sound is very good as is the range with the cordless handset. The base unit and the cordless handset are also stylishly designed. The backlighting on the cordless handset is also very useful at night.

I like the directory feature in both the handset and the base unit. However, that said, you can't transfer your directory information from the base unit to the handsets. So, you have to enter the directory information twice. Once for the base unit, then for the handset. You can however transfer directories from handset to handset. I wish Siemens would do the same for the base unit->handsets.

Another irksome "feature" is transferring calls. Most phone systems you put the caller on hold and then let another person pick up the call. You can't do this with this phone. You have to put them on hold by pressing conference. Not the most intuitive way of placing calls on hold. This is also the only way of joining a call. You can't just pick up the phone and press talk.

The message system is also cumbersome to use. Deleting messages involves navigating through way too many menu's. Something this simple and used often should be very accessible.

If Seimens were to make the phone a bit more user friendly, give the base unit battery backup I think it would have a clear winner in the cordless phone market.

Based on the many positive (and some mixed) reviews of this product I decided to jump in any try the Siemens Gigaset system in my home. We have two phone lines and five bedrooms on three floors. And we desperately needed the intercom and phone solution promised by Siemens.

I setup a Gigaset 2420 and two additional handsets through out the house. Setup was relatively easy and ease of use was very good. Initially the base station was located in an office in the 3rd floor loft area. But some of the handsets would report the three beep "out of range" warning all too frequently. Especially if you walk around while talking on the phone.

The other problem was that sometimes the extension phone reception would be garbled like a bad digital cellphone signal. This wouldn't be obvious to the person using the extension handset, but the person on the other end of the line would sometimes find the conversation uninteligable.

We have used other cordless phones both 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz and have never experienced range or signal quality problems to this extent.

In an attempt to fix these problems I relocated the base station to the main middle floor. But still the problems with out-of-range warnings and occasional garbled speech persisted (even with the extension handset less than 50 feet from the base station.

So the Gigaset is getting packed up and sent to the auction.

I would recommend this system for a small office where the range is not too great. The ergonomics, styling and features are great. It does exactly what it is supposed to do. But in a large home or larger area business installation the poor signal quality and range make it unsatisfactory. It seems strange that a phone system that can handle 8 extension handsets wouldn't have a better range. Unless those extensions are all adjoining cubicles it doesn't work from my experience.

System works well...except it's lacking in design. It's too easy to knock the handset off-hook by accident; no beep to alert messages are waiting; hand set and remote phones are not comfortable to cradle.

Most annoying of all is that if there is a power outage, it loses it's programming! The clock resets, messages get deleted, your pin number to access messages remotely goes! How complicated is it to have a battery backup? A unit at this price should have been thought out and engineered better!

After reading all the reviews and having my own experiences, I've concluded two main factors affect these reviews:

1. Functions - Siemens has produced two different versions. Newer versions have some important features missing in original version. They are a)ability to transfer directories and b)ability to turn private mode off (allows user to join call without having to have call transferred to them)

2. Reliability - Siemens has had ongoing quality problems. This explains why some users rave about the phone and others complain severely. Both groups of users are reporting their experiences accurately.

I've experienced both excellent performance and lousy performance with my phones. the base unit was replaced once. I have replaced two handsets. I just ordered third handset replacement (LCD failed after a week). Siemens warrantly replacement is straightforward, fast, and cost free (they pay shipping). They don't even ask for proof of purchase. But I strongly suspect they have had so many quality problems, that they gave up trying to ask for proof of purchase. There's a never ending supply of refurbished Siemens phones for sale. It seems they've had long run of quality problems, only to exascerbate them by recycling the phones through the refurb program. They need to destroy these phones, rather than refurb and recycle them. A refurb is what you get as a warranty replacement.

I fully expect to be replacing these phones every 1-2 months until my patience runs out. Unfortunately, no other vendor makes a comparable 2-line phone. Yes, I tried the Panasonic and found its functionality was sorely missing in critical areas for me.

I purchased this phone system as a package from a local retailer; it contained the base unit model 2420 and two of the handsets, model 2400.

Things I like: sound quality and design appearance. The phones are crystal clear all the way from my basement office to the second floor bedrooms. The base unit and handsets are sleek and stylish, and the handsets are unobtrusive in their handset cradles. I also like the ability to route fax calls through the unit automatically. The speakerphone is the best I've ever heard, loud and clear without the cheap tinniness of most speakerphones.

Things I don't like are the complexity of the caller ID and answering machine menus, and the kludginess of the handset menus especially when transferring calls to another location. Additionally, the handset keys are not backlit (although the display itself is backlit,) making dark-dialing impossible. Similarly, the base unit display is not backlit. Combine this omission with the slanted arrangement of the base unit display, and it is very hard to read unless you have a light shining directly on it and you are at just the right angle.

All this being said, I think I'd still buy the phones because their overall functional quality is excellent. If Siemens will just tidy up the user interface and remember those of us who get and make lots of phone calls while half asleep in the middle of the night, they will have a real winner.