Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
The Best SIP phone for the money.
By M
I recently installed an Asterisk-based PBX in my home and office and chose this phone after seeing it recommended in Nerd Vittles.The phone is wonderful. The phone has 12 buttons that have soft-labels (an LCD next to them that you can configure to say whatever you want) and status lights (which can be used to show the status of particular feature code or as a busy lamp field to show when someone is using another extension). The top set of six buttons can have two screens (one button has a "More") label, for a total of 12 programmable keys. The bottom six buttons can have four screens.The phone has a separate voicemail indicator light in the upper right hand corner, which also indicates when your connection is down.The phone has four line dedicated line buttons, but can be configured to support up to 8 SIP registrations. You can access lines 4 through 8 by programming one of the soft-keys to be a line key, or by using the left and right arrows on the phone to switch between lines.The phone also has dedicated soft keys for Goodbye, Options, Hold, Redial, Mute, and Speakerphone.The phone has a redial button that stores the last 100 numbers that you've called along with the date, time, and length of the call, and a call log that stores the Caller ID, date, time, and length of the last 200 calls you received. It also supports a private and system-wide directory that can hold at least 100 numbers.The phone also has a six line status screen that will show you which line you are using, two programmable lines that you set to say whatever you want, the date and time, and how many missed calls you've received.Many of the configuration options can be set up using a web browser, by logging into the phone's web-address. The default username is admin and the default password is 22222. However, if you want to make many advanced changes, you have to set-up an aastra.cfg file and a .cfg file with the phone's MAC address in the /tftpboot folder of your PBX. The phone has an option that will allow you to create the .cfg file from the browser interface, and many new IP PBX's support auto configuration of the phone.The phone can be configured to work directly with a VOIP SIP provider (there are many to choose from), but I'd recommend that you download PBX In A Flash or the FreePBX Distro (both are FREE software that you can use to configure a SIP-based PBX) and install them on a VMWare Player machine (also a free download) and play around with them.Sound quality is excellent. The only possible complaint I've heard about the phone is that it is too light. I don't agree with that complaint, but I agree that the phone does not weigh as much as the Cisco phones (which I believe have a ballast in them to make them heavier). I've never had a problem, because the feet on the phones keep them in place nicely despite their relatively light weight. One other possible complaint is the handsets, which are not shaped consistent with traditional phones. I didn't like them at first, but within a week or so, I grew accustomed to the handset and now I have no complaints about them.The phone ships with two feet that can be used to adjust the angle a bit, and there is an optional "high-angle" stand available for about $20.00 that will lift the phone up almost straight if you want it.The phone comes with a power supply, but if you have POE (Power Over Ethernet), you don't need it, because the phone will accept voltage from a POE-enabled ethernet cable. This is useful if you want to put the phone in a place where there isn't readily accessible power. You can buy a POE injector from Amazon.com for about $15.00.Aastra regularly updates the firmware for these phones, which you can download from their web-site. I'm currently running version 2.6, because I found version 3.2 to be too buggy back in March of 2011. 3.2 may well be better now.UPDATE May 2013: Firmware 3.2 is still quite buggy, and does not have all of the features that 2.6 has. I'm staying with 2.6 until they iron out the bugs in 3.2 and get all the features working.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent, phone!
By E. Thomas
We've used just about all the most popular brands, from the high end to the bargain brands.All of them work fine with our voip provider, voisip.com (highly recommended).And all except the Grandstream work great with Asterisk based IP PBX systems.The differences boil down mostly to Build Quality, Features and Price.Here's my summary of each, in order of my preference, rated on scale of 1 to 5 (5 being best).Yealink - Calls 5, Build 4, Features 4, Price Low-Moderate.Aastra - Calls 5, Build 4, Features 5, Price Moderate-HighPolycom - Calls 5, Build 5, Features 5, Price High.Cisco - Calls 5, Build 4, Features 4, Price Moderate-High.Grandstream - Calls 4, Build 3, Features 2, Price Low.So you can see, I think the Yealink is the best value.Aastra is worth a bit more if you need key features.Polycom is just about perfect, but rather expensive.Cisco has name recognition, and is solid, but not a great value.Grandstream is ok for a basic phone, but awful if you need the features to work.Hopefully this summary helps others in their search.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Solid, well built phones
By C. Calvert
We've purchased quite a few of these phones (since the 6755i was discontinued). The 675x phones are all well built and reliable (rarely does the firmware ever crash and/or have to be reset like on other cheap VoIP phones).Aastra's XML features are great if you're interested in building services for your phones. The latest firmware supports callbacks for pretty much every phone event (connect, disconnect, startup, offhook, onhook, etc) plus polling and dedicated button actions. These various callbacks allow for a number of creative services and features to be added to the phones (if you're able to build a web service) even if you don't have any control over your VoIP PBX.
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