Home phone recommendations?

December 24, 2010 11:07 AM

Please recommend a good landline phone system for our home + home office.

Our old Panasonic landline phone is dying (we're on our second or third set of batteries), and I'd like to take advantage of the after-Christmas sales and get something good in its place. Mrs. Mosk uses the phone a LOT for business, and I'm tired of seeing her frustrated by this phone's poor battery life and middle-of-the-road feature set. We live in a hilly area, so we need a landline as well as our cells as cell coverage isn't great where we live (thanks, AT&T!)

Requirements:

- must have at least two handsets, with some expansion capability for more, though I suppose this is sort of the standard these days
- must have excellent (!!!) battery life. Mrs. Mosk works from home 3 or 4 days per week and is on the phone most of that time. Multiple handsets and/or swappable batteries are a must.
- Bluetooth capabilities would be nice (I don't know if this is a standard feature these days). Alternatively, we might just get her a dedicated, office quality Plantronics BT or wireless headset, or something similar from another manufacturer. This is a case where I'd rather buy her something really good than put up with something mediocre, but if a phone is otherwise excellent we can work around a poor stock headset (or none at all)
- must have some answering machine capability (standard feature, probably?)
- must have speaker phone capability (full duplex would be great, half duplex is probably standard and OK)

Price range: under $300-ish? Price is not my main consideration for this, and I don't mind paying a more for a really good solution. A quick glance shows lots of phones in the $100-$140 range, so I'm not too worried about cost. I want to avoid junk.

Thanks! Recommend away :-)

posted by mosk to Technology (2 answers total)

Looks like Bluetooth is your major requirement, otherwise Panasonic KX-TG1062M is quite nice. We are quite satisfied. AFAIK, it fulfills all your requirements except bluetooth. The cordless handset uses 2 AAA batteries so if batteries get worse you can simply replace with good quality rechargeable batteries, no need of using proprietary ones.
I haven't really tested battery life so can't comment on it but if I understand correctly if you use higher mAh batteries, they should last longer.

We paid $76 on Amazon.
posted by zaxour at 8:44 PM on December 24, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks -- that's really close. If the handset on the main console was wireless, it would be perfect.

We're going to end up living with this for a while so I want to look some more.
posted by mosk at 10:46 PM on December 26, 2010