Uniden CLX-485 5.8 GHz Digital Expandable Cordless Phone with Color LCD, Answering System, Caller ID, and Dual Keypads

I bought this phone and 4 handsets 3 weeks ago and have used 2/3 of the features at this point. I had finally grown tired of the horrible battery life on my Panasonic 2.4GHZ KX-TG2730S and had to make the switch.

The Good:
1) Slick phone which is fairly comfortable to hold.
2) Easy to move info between the handsets and a great ability to label your handsets for in-house paging (instead of Handset #1, you can label it Basement).
3) Great battery life so far. The panasonics were going dead within 30 minutes after 2-weeks of usage.
4) No effect on my Wi-Fi set-up.

The Bad:
1) The built-in ring tones are terrible. Lots of choices, unfortunately none are very good. The all sound like bad cell phone ringers.
2) The coverage is so-so. In most areas of my house it is fine, but in some areas that were fine with the 2.4GHZ, the Unidens are iffy. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good.
3) Remote functions. Dialing in to...Read more

I bought this phone to replace my multi line Siemens phone system. The Siemens was great but it had terrible problems with my 2.4 wirless network. The Uniden at 5.8ghz has no problems at all with the network. I'll break it down as follows.

Good:
No wirless network problems
Color screen & lighted keypad
Speakerphone & speakerphone handsets
Battery life & appearance
No range problems (as others have mentioned)
Features

Less than Good:
Import from Outlook (This feature works well but has some bugs. Outlook numbers typically are not entered with a one for ten digit numbers as a one is usually assumed. Most cell phone providers have already figured this out. The Vtech in the same class had a good way of dealing with this problem by allowing you options prior to dialing by letting you select with or without a one. Uniden has no such option. Customer support said you must input the one into your contacts prior to...Read more

I have to admit, I was highly impressed with telephone capabilities of this system. There was no interference with our wireless Internet (a constant problem in our house), it was feature packed, and the color screen was very cool.

However, I have never dealt with such a quirky answering machine. It would answer the first 4 or 5 calls, and then it would stop answering (even though the answering machine was turned on the entire time). It would not pick up on the next 2 or 3 telephone calls (which we checked via caller ID), and then it would work again. We returned it and exchanged for another, but still had the same problem. Very unfortunate as it was a great phone otherwise.