Sunday, September 18, 2005

Phone answering machine


We just bought a new digital cordless phone + answering machine, the Panasonic KX-TG2357 at CostCo for $100. Ask me in a few weeks what I really think, but so far it seems to work great.




It has talking CallerID, with some type of letter-to-sound rules that attempt to pronounce the incoming names. The rules don't work very well: for example "Microsoft Corp" is pronounced "Mick-ROW-suft C-O-R-P". The CallerIQ feature (also known as http://www.openLCR.com) appears to be a rip-off: pay a monthly fee of $10 or so to a company that promises to give your phone some cool updates like personalized weather or ring tones. I'm not sure how it works, but for that money I don't intend to find out.


I may switch to Vonage for phone service one of these days, and I'm not sure what that will do to the features. One Amazon reviewer says that he bought it for VOIP purposes but turned out that it wasn't necessary. I'm not sure what that means.

No comments: