AT&T CL82201 DECT 6.0 Cordless Telephone with Talking Caller ID and Digital Answering System

It's Okay

We've been using the phone for our home and business daily for about 1 week now. It seems to work ok so far. We paid only [$] due to discount and rebate, although...Read complete review

We've been using the phone for our home and business daily for about 1 week now. It seems to work ok so far. We paid only [$] due to discount and rebate, although the regular retail of the phone is [$] If I had paid that amount, I would have returned it. It is definitely NOT for multi-line or even multiple phone use, although the info says you can use up to 12 handsets with it. Two are included with the phone. The base is very light-weight, not too sturdy, and looks sort of "cheap". When you push the 'play' button to hear messages, the base slides around. Too avoid that, you might want to put some velcro on the bottom or set it on a non-slip counter top. Also, regardless of whether you answer a call or not, the phone shows ALL calls as 'Missed Calls', so you have to delete that often and there is no way to change this setting. It evens states that in the manual. The phone does have the usual settings for # of rings, length of outgoing message, etc. The sound quality is often questionable, but can be adjusted somewhat by use of an 'equalizer' button and volume control on both the handsets and the base. Also, the system automatically announces each incoming call. This can be turned off, but you must be sure to turn it off on BOTH handsets or it doesn't work. On each handset, turn off both the base and the handset options. If either is left 'on' on either handset, the system will still announce each call. (Learned this through trial and error.) All in all, not the best option out there, but we will use it until it stops working. We previously had two phone systems from a different manufacturer prior, both of which worked beautifully for about 6 months, then started defaulting back to the automated voice for answering when we were away, and defaulting to taking messages although we had the system set for 'announcement only'. Tried the second one because we thought the first one might have just had a "glitch", but it did the same thing after about 6 months of use. These phone, like everything else in our society, have become disposable, so there's really not much reason to spend a fortune for something that doesn't last past 6 months or a year. Thought we'd try AT&T because we had a (much older and more sturdy) AT&T system with the tape for recording messages that lasted for about 4 years. They clearly don't make them like they used to!