AT&T EP5632 5.8 GHz Digital BlueTooth Enabled Cordless Phone with Answering System by AT&T
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Digital camera reviews of AT&T EP5632 5.8 GHz Digital BlueTooth Enabled Cordless Phone with Answering System
Digital camera Review: A year later...
Summary: 5 Stars
I've owned this phone system for over a year now. I use it as an extension to my cell phone, linked via bluetooth. It's been very dependable and reliable. I've done radio interviews on it and the audio quality is much higher than many other guests I've heard interviewed. I would purchase it again. Know that the batteries that come with this unit will not last too long. You'll end up replacing the batteries about once every 12-18 months most likely. This is not the phone's fault. The batteries are cheap. Find a better battery pack for the replacement and you'll have longer lasting batteries. Also recommend buying a battery for use in the base station for those power outages that happen on occasion.Digital camera Review: AT&T 5.8 GHz Digital Cordless Phone
Summary: 5 Stars
I just want to put a disclaimer out there that I am no expert on these kinds of phones so don't expect this to be an experts review. This is mainly a review to explain what I thought of this phone and what could be improved.
First things first, this phone was packaged well in the box it shipped in. So if your one of those people that are worried about damaged items while in shipment, I don't think your going to have to worry about this one. Every item is secured which allows for "non" movement in the box.
One thing I noticed however was that AT&T on purpose kept the battery and battery cover out of the phone while stored in the box, therefore keeping them seperate. I think what AT&T was doing here was since this phone uses a NMH (Nikel Metal Hydrade) battery, they wanted to make sure there was somewhat of a charge left in the battery as to opposed to other phones which get shipped with the battery attached and is completely dead or worse, shot and has to be replaced.
So, in other words, if you need to start using your new phone as soon as you got it, no problem! Just install the battery and its cover, hookup the base power and phone line cords and your ready to go. According to the manual it takes 16 hours to fully charge the battery from completely dead. And the battery is supposed to last 7 hours of continous use or 3 days on standbye. I can't attest to the 7 hours yet but I can say the battery does last at least 3 days on standbye.
Moving on to the base mounting. I really like what they have done here, they have designed the phone to either stand upward on its back foot as I call it for desktop use or if you turn the foot piece around on the back, its ready to mount on the wall, so its super easy to do! The foot piece has slots for the power cord and phone line to snap into so that it keeps the cords organised and look profesional. The base also has a slot in the left side to store a spare handset battery.
When you get new handsets, to expand your system to the available 12, you must use the base to register the new devices, this is for connections to cell phones as well. Each handset gets its own id and they are all seperate from each other. I have not gotten a second or third handset yet but I do have plans to do so.
I am no expert on the connections to cellphones but as I understand it, because this unit uses bluetooth technology, and cell phones use bluetooth, you can register your cell phone with the system so you can make free calls back and forth from each other.
The base unit also has a answering system/voice mail, this has probably got to be the most sophisticated voice messaging system I have ever seen. In other words, everything you can do with voice mail can be done here including but not limited to setting your outgoing message, viewing times and dates of the incoming voice mail, and listening to your voice mail on a handset device no matter where you are by using your pin number. You can perminantly save your voice messages as well for future reference.
I also like the intercom feature, if you live in a large house and or with a bunch of people, one thing you deffinetly don't want to have to do all the time is shout accross the room and down the stairs. Because of the expandable 12 handset feature, you could have 4 handsets in 4 different rooms and intercome with any of them from the base. And a even sweeter feature is that each handset on their own can intercome with another handset, not just the base.
Now lets move onto the handset itself, this is where the real features are. I want to start by saying that I am really glad that AT&T included a clip with this phone, so that way you can clip the phone to your belt or pocket and carry it with you within the 200 foot range limit. I have tested the range and it indeed does do 200 feet but I find it will lesson if your asking the wireless signal to go through a bunch of metal.
If the phone looses its signal, it will make a tone sound and will display on the LCD that its searching for the base. So that means you don't have to worry about manually resetting it, it will continue to search and connect with the base till it reconnects apon within range. Now thats a feature I loved right there, thankyou AT&T!
Another great feature about this handset is that it has speaker phone, so if your tired of holding it to your ear after an hour or you just want another person to hear the conversation, push the speakerphone button and your on speakerphone. What is also cool is that when speakerphone is active, the button itself will illuminate orange to indicate its on speaker phone and will also display that info in the display.
My opinion about the speakerphone, while cool and all that, it could be much louder. I have heard speaker phone or 2-way from people's cell phones which are much louder. So an improvement here would be to increase the volume of the speakerphone cause even with the volume all the way up, unless its almost sillent in the room, you won't hear what the person is saying.
A feature I absolutely love about the handset is the ability to personalise it. If you come from using the older cordless phones with the LED displays like me, you will really appreciate this! Not only can you name your phone in the display so that everybody knows which phone is their's, but you can also setup an extension, so that if somebody called your home phone number, if given the spacific extension, would only ring the spacific phone, reminds you of answering the phone at work right?
Furthermore, this phone has even more options to personalise. Such as the ability to select a background wall paper or background animation that can be viewed while using the phone. And it gives you the ability to customise your ring and there are a bunch of ringers to choose from! To make the deal even better, this phone gives you the ability to set a custome wallpaper and or ringer to people's spacific phone numbers. So say you want to know if its Mary thats calling and not your typical telemarketor at 5:00 PM?
Then you set Mary's ringer tone to swing and then everybody else to classical and by the second ring when the phone gets the caller ID information, the ringer you selected will be used to give you instant notification you are rescieving an important call from Mary and not a call that wants you to take a survey or purchase that $300.00 Bose headset.
The handset also has a onboard directory, so say you want to save all the important caller id's, people you know, people you work with, but don't care about all the unknown names, blocked calls, private calls, and other telemarketors. And you also dont want to have to cycle through all those caller id's just to find the number your looking for right? Well, all you gotta do is go to the edit options under a caller id and tell the phone to save it to the directory where you can then setup custom ringers for the number and wall papers.
For years you would make a call with a home phone by pressing your on button and putting in the number and then it makes the call. Now cordless phones have caught up with cell phones in that the phone gives you the ability to just put in your number and then hit the home button and it makes the call super fast. Or you could make a auto dial call by selecting one of the stored caller id's in your directory and hitting the home button, it will automaticly dial your number for you, no fuss.
In my opinion, having a full color LCD display is nice because its easier for me to use my phone, easier for me to set up options and make calls. Another nice feature is if a home phone on the same line is being used, the handset or even the base will tell you "home phone in use". So there is no more of those, oh I'm sorry, I did not know you were on the phone routines!
And if you using the phone in the dark, its really nice to have that bright display and the pretty blue buttons which get illuminated by the blue backlight. So, if your a gamer and play in the dark and need to make a phone call at 3:00 Am in the morning, you no longer have an excuse that you could not see the buttons and you called the mayor instead of your buddy Frank.
I also would like to mention that the handsets come with a transperent protective cover over a part of the handset which protects your LCD display, I was wondering when companies were going to start doing that after so many past items returned due to cosmetic damage. And don't forget the this system can utilise bluetooth headsets so if your one of those people always on the move and need your hands but don't like the limitations of speaker phone, your in luck!
Last thing reception. Boy have I ever heard complaints from people regarding wireless cordless phone reception. One thing I have learned recently about bluetooth is you can never expect it to pick nothing up at all if you live near cell phone towers or radio stations, just get used to it, its going to happen.
However, since I have made some calls and recieved many from this phone, I feel that the reception is really good. There was only one call that I was picking up cell phone tower interferance but the volume level of that interferance was so low that it did not bother me at all. And because of the 5.8 GHZ frequency range, you don't have to worry about interferance from televisions or microwaves because they run on the old standard which I believe is 900 MHZ. To sum it up, calls are clear, what more can you want?
So, in conclusion I believe this is the best home phone I have ever bought, weather corded or cordless. I really wanted a lot of features for the money and I believe I got it and then some. My favorite features are the intercome, messaging system, high requency range, handset speakerphone, handset personalization, and handset button illumination. And the reception is pretty clean but don't expect it to be perfect. Weather for your home or your small business, this is the phone for you! I give this a 5 out of 5.
Date Purchased: 09/15/2008
Price Paid: $78.64
Reccomend: YES
Digital camera Review: AT&T Bluetooth Phone
Summary: 4 Stars
I am pleased with the overall performance of the phone. I purchased the phone because of the bluetooth function. I wear hearing aids and have a Epoq streamer (bluetooth) from Oticon. It works with my cell phone when I am mobile. With the AT&T EP5632 phone and my streamer the voices from my cell or landline are received directly to my hearing aids. It is wonderful.Digital camera Review: AT&T EP5632 - 5.8 GHz Digital BlueTooth Enabled Cordless Phone w/Answering System
Summary: 5 Stars
If your like me and don't hate to hold the phone up to your ear physically for a long conversation for a long period of time? Then this is the phone for you. I use bluetooth headsets with my cellphone every chance I get. Around the house when I'm on the road. I have two kids so I need to keep my hands free to do stuff for them a lot especially around the house. I hate leaning my neck to the side to hold the phone to use both hands especially for a long period of time. I get a cramp in my shoulder after awhile. So I bought a phone that uses a wired headset and that works fine off and on. But the wire was getting in my way sometimes for certain stuff I would want to do around the house and clipping the phone to my pants wasn't working because if I bend or stretch the wrong way it would fall off. So when I saw this house phone with bluetooth I had to have it. I know bluetooth can be a little static sometimes but it does help if your very active around the house and try to talk on the phone at the same time. It will pair with a wide variety of bluetooth models but only some may give you a clear no static signal without echo. I have a Jawbone,Motorola 700, Jabra something model? and a few others I can't remember? These seem to work the clearest and furtherest from the base station. But right now I'm using the Motorola HT820 it's the regular stereo headphone sized headset that lets you hear the persons voice on both sides and you can use it to listen to music from you bluetooth stereo if you have one. Setting up the bluetooth part maybe a little frustrating off and on until you get used how the phone works but still a great phone to have.Digital camera Review: AT&T EP5632 BlueTooth Phone
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a terrific phone. The BT install was cake. Lots of cool features. I would recommend it.