Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Good features but basic functionality requires more work
By Igor
Have been using the phone for ~6month.Other reviews have covered the nifty features, so I wanted to concentrate on theday-to-day usage.* Sound: quality seems to be good i.e. cant complain, but the volume is low. Sometimeshard to hear the other person, yet the sound when navigating through menu(s) is very loud.* Speed: the phone is slow to react to key press, both in menu navigation and number dialing.* DTMF tones: do not work reliably. Happened several times when calling to an IVR the systemwould not recognize responses that are dialed in. I guess the phone does not produce the DTMFtone for long enough time for systems to recognize it.* Phone book: slow to upload the contact to the phone, seems like 10 seconds per contact.What is worse intentional phone are NOT transfered correctly.* SIP calling: seems no clear way to dial somebody by a sip address. Which is the whole point of an "IP phone".
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Awesome hardware - software needs work
By A. Amann
While the phone itself works well (both land line and VOIP) with great sound quality, there are some serious shortcomings in the software:* phone book transfer is seriously broken - it removes initial digits from the number, making it useless (reading back the phone book from a hand set and sending the same file back without any changes will result in different entries that what was originally there!) I had to manually edit every single entry after the transfer* VOIP username is limited to 32 characters (which made it impossible to use my current OneSuite account, requiring me to create a new one just for the phone to be happy)* response on the hand set when doing anything is extremely slow - I guess I have to work on my patienceI hope that these issues will eventually be resolved (though I have been told by support that the 32 character limit cannot be changed) as it is only software. The hardware itself is great and I would buy or recommend this phone in a heart beat!
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent IP Phone!
By Lars Olsson
I ordered the Siemens as a replacement for an aging Panasonic system that we needed more handsets for anyway. Prior to buying the Siemens, I'd fooled around with VoIP using a Sipura ATA (SPA-3000), and while it was decent, the configuration practically required a technical certification to decipher and properly program all on its own. That may be wonderful if you already know your way around outbound proxies, DTMF, hook-flash delays and other arcana of the telephone industry, but if you're like us, all that together in one big sticky lump was a pretty steep learning curve, especially if all you want to do is get the phone to ring reliably. We did NOT want to go the Vonage route, because Vonage's business model is to partner with vendors that will make Vonage-specific phones which require virtually no installation...but have proprietary hardware and software which locks you in to only using that hardware with Vonage's services, which is where they make all their money. It's exactly like being tied down to a contract to a particular wireless provider...except that with Vonage, the contract period never ends unless you're willing to buy all-new hardware in order to break free.Between the poles of super-configurable-but-difficult-to-understand (and use) and dead-simple-but-locked-into-one-provider, sat the Siemens S675IP. Most people who don't deal with them in the corporate world may be most familiar with Siemens from billboards in airports and elsewhere. They're huge in Europe, not so much in America - at least for consumer-level devices. That may be changing, if the quality and ease-of-use of this phone translate into the kind of sales I think it should. The Siemens unit was quite easy to set up and, while it required some knowledge of what SIP and VoIP in general are, the requirements for understanding it enough to set it up were quite low indeed. In short, it was nearly as dead-simple as Vonage makes their units while still being what you can think of as an "unlocked" system. Using Siemens' web configurator presents the user with a clean, pleasant-looking interface that allows for a surprising degree of configurability...IF (and only if) you want to go there. If you don't, you need only enter in the details of at least one VoIP provider, and you can be chit-chatting away in no time.The second side of the S675IP that made it a real winner for our needs (and possibly yours?) was its legacy interface to the old POTS line. While much of the industrialized world is starting to switch their residential home phone usage to mobile phone-only, getting rid of their land line, we happen to live in an area where the most-reliable Internet connection is still DSL over voice from either the telephone company or a third-party DSL provider. So that means I pretty much have to have a landline, whether I use it much or not (in truth, I DO use it infrequently for things like faxes and it's always nice to have it there in case of an emergency for things like 911 calls, if necessary). With the S675H, you simply plug the old line that used to go to your old analog phone into the jack on the DECT base unit, and it "registers" as another line. Using the aforementioned web configurator, you can specify in as much or as little detail as you want (using dialplans) what types of calls to what area codes or even specific numbers you wish to have dialed using which service. In other words, if you have a landline like I do, you might wish to have all your local area calls be dialed out using the landline, so local businesses and neighbors, etc, will recognize your phone number as local. You have all other long-distance numbers routed through your VoIP provider, generally saving you tons of money. Voila! All the convenience and reliability of a traditional analog landline combined with all the savings and higher voice quality of VoIP provider of your choice (up to six, I believe, if you want to get that fancy), WITH the ease-of-use of a sole provider like Vonage...all in one handset. For my money, it just doesn't get a lot better than that.The S675IP can take on multiple additional handsets, each of which can also be configured as broadly or as specifically as you wish, and you can add Siemens' DECT repeaters if you've got a truly humongous house, though in my testing and use so far, I've gone all over our 4,000 sq. ft. house and out into the yard as far as the back fence and the street in front and never experienced a loss of call quality. The "answering machine" is built right into the handset which comes with the S675IP (and each additional handset has their own), eliminating the need for that large and bulky unit that previously took up space on your desk or kitchen counter, making it an even more sleek and integrated experience. If that weren't enough already, you can quite easily export vCards from your contact-management program of choice, whether Apple's Address Book or Microsoft Outlook, and upload the file directly to the S675IP using the web configurator.Happy as a clam? Ha! Clams aren't as happy as I am, to have traded our old boat-anchor of a cordless phone system for the S675IP. I didn't order any extension handsets initially because this was my first experience with a Siemens IP telephony product and I didn't want to have to potentially return multiple items if it wasn't satisfactory. But after just a short time now with the S675IP, I'll be ordering at least two and maybe three or four additional handsets -- maybe the upgraded S79H which Amazon currently has the best price on - right here: http://www.amazon.com/Siemens-S79H-Gigaset-Expansion-Handset/dp/B0037NYUBW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293569021&sr=8-1 You might be wondering why this review is four stars instead of five in the "Battery Life" and "Ease of Use" department, if I'm so thrilled with this phone. For battery life, I did take one star off because the S67H handset which comes included as part of the S675IP package has two rechargeable AAA batteries instead of a replaceable lithium battery pack. To be fair to Siemens, I haven't pushed the charge to its limit yet, and it's gone for quite some time, especially in standby, even with the AAA batteries. But these days, most phones don't make you use regular-size batteries, and they're usually able to squeeze better performance out of a custom-designed lithium or even old-style NiMH battery pack. Make sure you don't pop regular off-the-shelf alkalines like Eveready or Duracell into the S67H handset; Siemens specifically cautions you to use only "approved" rechargeables (two are included). As far as the "ease of use" metric, I took one star off because as I said earlier, the Siemens is not QUITE as dead-simple as a locked-down Vonage unit would be to set up. If you're a technophobe, the Siemens WILL be somewhat more difficult and confusing for you. Then again, if you're a true technophobe, you probably don't even know what VoIP is, and this isn't the phone for you, anyway. For everyone else, the difference in ease of setup between this and a Vonage or other single-provider-branded VoiP unit is small enough that you likely won't care at all. And, for that measurable-but-tiny increase in complexity of setup, you get a LOT more flexibility to set the S675IP up exactly the way YOU want, using the providers YOU prefer (and changing them at whim). This is a system that will grow with you over time, not just because of the flexibility of being able to use it on any SIP-based VoIP system, but because of the ease of adding additional handsets. Siemens has a winner on their hands!
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