Customer Reviews

UNIDEN 900MHz Cordless Telephone *Charcoal Gray*

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

 

 

First, the model number is EXI8966, not 9866. I bought this in year 2000, and in 2001 added a 1300mAh NiMH battery pack to it(bought from Amazon, outer package said AT&T, while battery said Sanyo. You can see my seperate review of that battery). Even with supplied NiCD battery, which is only rated 600mAh, you get up to 7 hours of talk time. All other features work as advertised. The handset surivived a few drops on the carpeted floor. The base speakerphone is pretty loud and clear, can hear from across the room. No need to put my ears to it to hear the caller talking.

The flaws are minor. I'd like to see the entire handset keypad backlit, not just the numeric keys plus the Talk button. The base keypad has no backlighting at all (and the base is running on AC adapter, so there should be no concern of battery life here). The major flaw is the method of inputting alphabetical names into the handset's memory. It's not a design flaw of this phone only, but every Uniden cordless 900MHz made around that time was designed this way. Instead of using keypad to enter a letter, like pressing "2" will cycle through "A B C a b c 2" so you can pick one you want, they force you to use Up and Down arrow keys, to scroll through the whole big list, the entire alphabet, capital letter, small letters, 0-9, then some characters. For every character you enter, you have to do this. By the time you enter phone numbers into the memory, only will they allow you to use the keypad. The designer of this "feature" must be on cracks while he/she worked on it.

Overall, it's good quality, durable, and a good value. There were several Radio Shack models back at that time, were Uniden OEM products(they have handsets that look almost identical to this one).

We like this phone so much we've bought two and are about to purchase a third. What we really like are the dual caller ID displays (so you can check caller id even if the handset is not at the base, or vice versa) and the dual keypad with speakerphone, which allows us to to check our voice mail while we're doing other things.

A really nice package by Uniden.

Bought this phone based on Consumer Reports. However, when trying to set it up, whenever I plugged it in, an extremely loud buzzing sound came out. Adjusting the speaker volume had no effect. Evidently some kind of short circuit in the product. Poor quality control. Now need to go through a cumbersome return process (I was installing it more than 30 days after buying it).