Digital Trends

Philips VOIP841

December 4th, 2007 | by Brandon King

Setup and Use

We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the color screen, and the ease of setting the whole system up. Selecting your country, language and area code after a 14-hour first time charge is all that stands between opening the box and signing into your Skype account. Menus are arranged logically and strongly resemble the basic Skype interface, and landline options are sprinkled in where necessary. Setup takes around one minute and won’t tax you in the slightest. For more difficult installations, nearly every network option you might need can be found in the Settings menu: DHCP, port, gateway, primary/secondary DNS, etc.

Once signed into your Skype account, you can set your status, retrieve your contact list and select the services you subscribe to. You can view all your contacts and any imported from Outlook by Skype on your PC, receive/accept invitations, add or find Skype contacts, and view your call history. Callers can also be blocked and profiles viewed. On the landline side of the equation, you can assign a particular number to each contact (such as with/without the initial “1” or area code), select preference for landline or SkypeOut, and use the built in speakerphone and intercom. The phone uses DECT 6.0, which ensures clear communication to the base unit. The handset volume can also be set anywhere from almost inaudible to blaringly loud, and the independent ringers for landline and Skype calls can additionally be customized to a number of different pleasing tunes. 

So far, so good, right? Well, hold your horses… The incoming call quality is great, but the outgoing suffers from some echo, with each word spoken heard through the headset with a split-second delay (very slight, but noticeable and distracting). Micro-vibrations are greatly amplified as well – a symptom of the cheap plastic and omni-directional microphone that handles headset and speakerphone input. Unfortunately, these problems exist during both Skype and landline calls.

If that was all that we found troublesome about the VOIP841, it would have earned a much-higher review score. Sadly, things get worse. Landline integration at the most superficial level works well. But there is no on-phone memory, meaning no speed dial setting or phone book either. In order to access any contact, you MUST be signed into Skype. Even then, there is no way to quickly select a contact, as you must scroll through all acquaintances. Have you heard of a landline phone released in the last 15 years without memory? Neither have we. The obvious workaround for this is to sign into Skype, and leave it set to Invisible or Away, but that causes a whole new set of problems. 

Once signed into Skype via the VOIP841, you also lose the ability to reliably use Skype anywhere else. If you do sign in though the desktop client, the program will randomly choose a status (handset or software) setting, and send anyone wishing to text chat a message saying that your client doesn’t support chat features. After a few attempts to talk, the request will go through and appear on the PC, but you’d have to explain the situation to every person in your contact list beforehand. And if you are set to Invisible on the VOIP841, anyone searching for you, regardless of your PC Skype status, will be unable to find you unless they attempt several times. Likewise, calls when both clients are signed in can go to either the handset or the software phone in a seemingly random choice.

If all the above confuses you, here’s the simple version: You cannot login to Skype while your phone is logged in. That means that every time you leave home, you need to log your phone off Skype, or simply never sign in to begin with in the first place. Well, unless you want to access your contacts, that is… note the irony?