MOTOROLA MD491 2.4GHz Cordless Phone Answering System

Comment: This was an impulse purchase while shopping at the Home Despot or equivalent, I won't do that again! Bad sound quality, bad answering machine, short battery life, where to start?

The sound quality is simply awful. It seems to cut off the first half-syllable of any speech. That's enough to disqualify it from consideration, but there is more bad to come.

The phone only has a small red LED to alert you of a recorded message, so small you have to look closely to see if there are messages waiting. Answering machine performance is subpar, when you play messages it only gives you the day - not date - of the call, and since it doesn't maintain its time of day clock for long after a power failure (more about that later), you can only guess the date of a message. You can't erase a message while its reception day is announced, you must wait for the message to start playing. When it's done playing there is no opportunity to erase it, so you have to play it - and listen to the time and day all over again. If the message is short, such as when the caller hangs up after listening to the OGM, there is little opportunity to erase it at all. This idiotic design makes it so inconvenient to erase messages that the machine quickly fills up with "old" messages. This wouldn't be so bad if the machine stored the date of the call, so I could tell if it's old enough to forget about, but all I know is that a message was received "Wednesday". That may have been several Wednesdays ago.

As others noted the caller ID appears shortly after the first ring, then disappears, making the feature almost useless. Furthermore, if you scroll through your incoming calls, and elect to erase one of the entries, that leaves a "hole" in its memory that becomes filled by the next call. In other words, you can't simply determine who called last by looking at the last entry in the list, the only way to do that is to never erase any caller ID entries - another stupid design.

More stupidity is the time and date setup. Setting the month, date, and year should be sufficient for the phone to determine the day of the week, but no, you have to program the date and the day. A little more memory would have fixed this annoyance.

It has a battery backup (4 AA batteries) but the batteries become fully depleted after a day or two without power. The phone comes with a wall mount bracket, but installing it covers the battery compartment, so replacing the batteries is inconvenient to the point I've stopped trying. Since having to set the time, date, and day every time the power fails, I stopped doing that too.

My phone came with a wireless handset. It is also power-hungry so don't plan on leaving it out of its charger for more than a day. Its display began to deteriorate soon after I got it, the LCD display is now missing entire rows of pixels so it's become illegible.

In summary this phone is complete and utter junk, the only positive thing I can say is that when I called to complain about its awful sound quality their customer service was pleasant, and suggested it may have been due to wireless network interference. I don't think my wireless network is conspiratorial enough to cut off only the first syllable of every word, so I doubt that's it. By the way she asked where the phone is installed - in the kitchen of course. She said that's the worst place for a phone. Bizarre, no?

Between this unpleasant piece of junk and an even worse Motorola cell phone I had for a brief time, I will never buy another Motorola product again.

If you call me and leave a message, but I don't get back to you, now you know why. Send me a post card.

Comment: I bought this unit in a package with 2 additional handsets. While I gave the unit two stars, I'd lower that to one star if you intend to expand to additional handsets.

For starters, the quality is horrendous. The first time I replaced the batteries in the base unit (which are there just in case the wallplug power fails), the battery cover clip snapped, so now I have to tape it shut. In addition, rows of pixels in the LCD displays have failed making it difficult to read.

As far as features go, the worst is the address book. You are limited to 11 characters in the name. The list can be sorted alphabetically, but not SEARCHED alphabetically. You either need to scroll down the list, or memorize the item# (you can call Mom if you know shes listing #10 by pressing 10). Each additional handset stores its own address book. In order to use the shared address book (from the base), you have to press a button to toggle to the shared list. The intercom feature doesn't work well either. It seems to fail to make the connection occasionally, or works only one-way.

Battery life on the additional handsets is awful. I routinely run out if on the phone for 60-90 minutes.

Comment: We got this phone when we moved to a new house with only three phone jacks. The battery life has been great, as long as we put the cordless phones on the docks. The PhoneBook feature is fantastic. BUT...now I have lost use of the ON and OFF buttons on our most used handset. Making it nearly impossible to answer, or hang up a call. We haven't had any other issues, clear, loud and convenient, until 2 and a half years later.

Comment: I thought the quality on my phone was just fine, but the battery didn't last (replaced it in < 1 yr and now, 6 mos. later, the 2nd one is going) and the 2nd handset keep losing contact with the base. IN addition, the base is not what I consider wallmountable...since it juts off the wall a good 8-10 inches (and gets whacked by everyone that walks by). I would have expected more from motorola.

REgarding some other reviews, clearly people did not read their manual s or play with their phone, so I feel a need to clear a few things up:
1. phone not ringing on cordless hand set OR phone ringing too loudly on handset---> you can adjust each handset to high, medium, low, off, or a different ring. Each handset adjusts separately (my bedroom is on low, my family room is on high).
2. No volume control for earpiece --> There is an up/down controller on the side of the headset that allows for earpiece volume control.

Comment: We got this phone (base with two handsets) three years ago for close to $150. The reception was good, the base is solid. We love the walkie-talkie feature. But as many reviewers said the phonebook is annoying, no search function at all. That's not the worst, both handsets lost function of quite some buttons. One is impossible to use other than taking a call. I am not sure if Motorola is bad at this or what. I own a simple Motorola cell phone, which also has two keys lost function. In addition, the handsets had very short battery life, talking maximum 20 min. The phone including the base will not ring sometimes, I am not sure it's the problem of the phone or the phone service company (Vonage). Now we are looking to just change the handsets, not sure if other brands' handsets will work with this phone base.