BT/EE Essential Digital Home Phone with HD Calling, Works Only With BT/EE Smart Hub 2

good phone.
this one was a replacement for the original that suddenly broke, as the springs on the battery compartment gave out, meaning it wouldn’t charge. it’s a great phone, the same essential phone you can get from bt. it’s easy to pair with your hubb and works as it should. though plese note, this is a voip voice over internet protocol phone for use with digital voice services that are being rolled out to every landline in the country. it’s not compatible with standard pstn.

Modern features in a house phone
When BT change you to ‘digital voice’ your old phone can’t just be plugged in. BT will send you a widget to put between your router and your old phone. That only works if Royal Mail are not on strike and they actually deliver it! After a week and a half with no phone I reluctantly ordered this handset from Amazon and it was delivered over night. It appears to be the only domestic digital land line phone available, and will only work with BT’s Smart Hub 2 router on your broadband. WIFI connection was very simple and worked first time in a few seconds. The handset has lots of modern features enabling you to make the best of the digital voice service and, while the instruction manual is extensive and well written, there is quite a lot to take in if you wish to make use of all the features. It stands on its own charger while not being used, although you can leave it there if you like to use the phone hands-free. I think the sound quality is OK – I’m rather deaf so it is never really clear to me at best. Digital voice has a built-in answering service which you get at via 1571, and there is a button on this handset to call this directly.Once the widget turns up (it’s actually called a Digital Voice Adapter) you can connect your old handsets to the digital service. Again, this is connected very easily by WIFI. It is perfectly possible to have both old and new handsets connected to the same phone line, through your broadband.There is a potential for difficulty if you have other equipment connected to your old phone – equipment that will auto-answer a call, such as your own message recorder, a fax machine, a call blocker, etc. One needs to set the auto-answer on the digital phone to max, and reduce the auto answer time on your device to ‘9 seconds’, I found that more than 7 seconds wouldn’t work. You need to do this to ensure that your device auto-answers before digital voice. Recommended.One feature that may be very useful in a busy household is that, while you have just one phone ‘line’ with one phone number, the digital line can accommodate up to five simultaneous calls. I haven’t tested this feature, but when setting the digital system up I found that this facility clashes with the use of the attached auto-answer equipment on my old handsets. I have had to switch off the multi-call facility, but I can see that it would be excellent in an all digital handset set up.

Quality
The item arrived undamaged read info setup was easy read info that comes with the item then connected to the Internet provider and wait for download and it was easy to setup the only cable is the cable to plug into the mains reception is good also sound and value for money make sure you leave on charger cradle for at least 16 or so hours then batterys fully charged happy with the product

Not reliable
We had this phone for 14 months approx , it has not worked properly since purchase . Bt tried to help us but didn’t help. The issue is it wont let me answer some phone calls , in fact now its all call .Bt said because it was bought from Amazon it would have to go back to Amazon . Which all this time later is hardly unlikely they will accept .