Cordless Phone Recommendations - 2007 Edition

We’re looking at getting a new cordless phone and would appreciate any information. Plenty of models fit our requirements – 2 handsets and an answering machine. My main concerns are reliability and sound quality. We have a small house, so we’ve never had range problems, and our existing 2.4 GHz model hasn’t interfered with my wireless PC set-up.

In the last cordless phone thread, there seemed to be two major points:

  1. Panasonic is a reliable brand
  2. There are many advantages of the older 900 mHz models over the newer 2.4 and 5.8 GHz models

Has any of this information changed, and do folks have any other recommendations for specific brands or hertzes? If I can’t find 900 mHz models any more, is 2.4 GHz better sound quality than 5.8 GHz, or is there no discernable difference?

2.4 will (can) interfere with your wireless network and other signals in the house a lot more than 5.8. Some people’s problems with 2.4 are so bad that when their phone rings, their network goes down and doesn’t come back up until you hang up.

The 5.8s were significantly more expensive a year or so ago, but I don’t know how much that has changed.

Edit: Also, I had some cheapie V-Tech phones a while back (a couple of years ago), and I thought they were fine… Until I got a Panasonic. The Panasonic phone was great.

I’d also be very interested in this. I use a cordless for conference calls and whatnot, and sometimes the buzzing almost makes the calls inaudible.

I also had a household with a panasonic 900mhz (awesome) and several crap vtech 900mhz (much less awesome, more like crap).

My panasonic 900mhz cordless recently died so I just went and replaced all the phones in the house with 5.8ghz panasonic phones. Fry’s has the 2 handset (expandle to 4) onsale all the time between $60-80. I picked up one set with included digital answering machine (to consolidate some devices) and then another set without the answering machine.

A nice thing about these phones even though they were different models and looked quite different I could pair any handset with either base. This let me setup my phone book one time and then clone it to all the other handsets. Then I re-paired the handsets with their corresponding base.

Buying additional handsets I think is pretty pricey. Often the Fry’s deals will be cheaper.

Overall I’m very happy with the phones. They are definitely louder than my old phone but then it also amplifies a bit of noise (fyi I had VE voice enhancement feature ON and volume at maximum). Overall though I would say it’s an improvement over the old 900mhz. Other nice features are customizable ring tones, different blinking antenna lights (to help ID who is calling if you have caller ID), speaker phone on the handset, ability to listen to your messages from any handset in the house, and standard 2.5mm headset jack (which I picked up two panasonic collapsible headsets which btw sound great).

Todays Fry’s ad has the panasonic KX-TG6022 with 2 handsets expandable to 4 for $60 (no rebate).
With answering machine usually adds around $10-20 when those models go on sale.
2 line support (which I don’t need) ups the price quite a bit.

Sam’s club sells a panasonic phone with a full 4 handset pack for something around $120 or so. I can’t remember the exact price.