Motorola MD761 5.8 GHz Digital Expandable Cordless Phone with Answering Machine and Caller ID (Black/Silver)

I bought this phone for my second (business) line at home. I have an AT&T (VTech) phone for the house phone and this product suffers in comparison.

First the good stuff: this phone is attractive and easy to set up. The menus navigate easily and you program the base from the handset (none of this silly separate programming). The buttons and whatnot I think are better placed and the phone is nicer looking.

But...

This phone suffers from a number of limits that are annoying. The AT&T phone handsets work from throughout the house. This phone doesn't reach even half the distance before it produces noticeable static and weak reception and dies before I get to the backyard (yipes).

Battery life seems to deplete rapidly. Hour long conference calls are a test for the phone.

If you don't hold the phone directly over your ear, you can't hear it very well. The phone isn't shaped in a way to keep the earpiece centered naturally and...Read more

Like a lot of other reviewers I was seduced by the design and features. I've had this phone/answerer with a total of 4 handsets for about 7 months now. The voice quality has been highly variable, but most of the time it has been bad. Even the recordings on the answering machine are difficult to understand at bets and unintelligible at worst. I probably paid the price as an early adopter, so don't make the same mistake I did. Do your research and don't buy this phone.

I bought this from Amazon along with an extra handset. My kids loved the features and the retro look. But the sound was awful, dropping syllables, and sometimes whole words, of the person on the line so you had to guess what they were saying. Motorola tech support told me to move the phone away from all interference: refridgerators, stereos, lamps. Lamps? "I thought the 5.8 GHz was meant to resist interference." "No sir, these phones are very sensitive." So I found a corner of my house away from everything, even lamps. Same problem. I returned it to Amazon, losing $40 in fees and postage. Bought a Uniden 5.8 GHz at Sears that turned out to have all the features plus crystal clear sound. Even right next to the lamp!