[Asterisk-Users] Opinion poll: best SIP phones for asterisk?

[Kevin]

Hi All-

I've just finished setting up my first asterisk box with an X100P and 
TDM40B, with basic asterisk config mostly from ManxPower's sample 
configs.  Thanks for posting those, Manx, and thanks for your help on 
IRC.

I'm also in the midst of carefully studying John Todd's config files, 
and I'm pretty sure that I'll be using large chunks of his in my own.  
Thanks in advance for sharing those, John, and for such extensive 
comments and documentation in your files.

As I'm doing this, I'm considering installing an asterisk box at my 
office (about 6-10 different phone stations) and would like to get 
opinions on the best quality and/or most well-supported SIP hard phones 
and SIP soft phone clients.  I see from John Todd's config files that 
the ATA-186 has (or had) some problems with asterisk, and I'm guessing 
that there are probably some other flukes that crop up with certain 
phones being connected to asterisk, so I thought I'd ask here before 
purchasing something in hopes of avoiding unnecessary hassles.

Many thanks to Mark Spencer and the rest of the development team for 
creating and sharing asterisk.  It's a very nice product.  I've been 
wanting something like this for a long time, and it sure looks like 
asterisk does now (or will soon do) all that I've been wanting and 
plenty more.  Though I'll admit to suffering some major frustration 
from a scarcity of documentation, I think I may finally be starting to 
get it through looking at examples and pointers from folks in IRC.

-Kevin

PS. What's the best source of documentation for the extensions.conf 
file?  I don't see any in the second draft of the Asterisk Handbook, 
not much that I can really make sense of in the wiki page 
(http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk+config+extensions.conf) 
which seems to be full of forward references and many apparently 
asterisk-specific references without definitions, and I don't see 
anything specific to extensions.conf on 
http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=documentation.  So far, the most 
useful documentation of that file that I've found is John Todd's config 
file with extensive comments.  Is there anything more complete?  If 
not, just knowing that this is the case will help me because I'll stop 
hunting for something that's not there.  TIA.