[asterisk-users] Best Hardphone (Subjective?)

[Chris Bagnall]

> > After working with the Grandstream GXP 2000 series phones, I have
> > decided that I am quite unhappy with their problems, both voice
> > quality, volume, features and others. For their price now, there are
> > plenty of phones to choose from as  well.

A couple of years ago when we first started doing medium-sized asterisk deployments, we installed a fair few GXP2000s. In fairness, at the time, they were about the only "business" phone in the £70 range that most of our clients were prepared to pay, so our choice was rather limited. Over the last 3-4 months they've finally got the firmware to the point it should have been when the phone was first released.

> > So subjectively what would be the best Hardphone for a small/medium
> > business with multiple line support, BLF, etc.

As always, it depends on your requirements. Personally, I love the 7960 on my desk, but the price point is too high for the vast majority of our clients, and many of them find it physically too big for their desks. We've had a go with the Elmeg ip290s, Linksys SPA-942s, and hope to play with the new Aastra range in the next few days. 

For build quality and footprint, the SPA-942s are hard to fault, but the web interface isn't the most pleasant and remote provisioning is hit-and-miss (mainly dependent on how cooperative your supplier is at getting you the provisioning documentation/software).

The ip290 has a nice, easy-to-use web interface that it's almost safe to let clients loose with, but the buttons feel cheap and the handset's too easy to misplace and leave a call active whilst meaning to hang up. On the other hand, the ip290 seems to play much more nicely behind NAT than anything else I've tried.

I'm very hopeful for the Aastra 55i/57i phones. The buttons are a little on the small side, but they feel firm, and the handset has a decent feel to it. Aastra have traditionally been very good about providing comprehensive documentation about their phones, so things like XML services/remote provisioning/etc. shouldn't be a problem. There's also the advantage that you can bolt a sidecar onto either model, which means you can stick with a common phone across a deployment for both receptionists and other staff - just add a sidecar or three to the receptionist phones.

> This is easily accomplished by a script on the server, allows me to
> reboot all the phones with one command and takes about 2 minutes.  I'm
> very happy with these phones.

How would you feel about sharing that script with the list? I'm sure it'd be of use to many of us here.

Regards,

Chris
-- 
C.M. Bagnall, Director, Minotaur I.T. Limited
For full contact details visit http://www.minotaur.it/chris.html
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