[Asterisk-Users] Any suggestions for an IP phone?

[Patrick Friedel]

Pavel Jezek wrote:

> according to this debate, I would like to try snom 360 still more 
> (features, opensource support, linux based) .... ;-)
> any good or bad experience with support from snom? or reliability of 
> snom phones?
> PJ
>
  I've been fiddling with a set of Snom 360's for a while now and really 
the worst I can say about them are:

1)  The buttons feel.  Odd.  They seem to be wearing in, though.  When I 
first got them they were a bit stiff/unresponsive, but my main testing 
phone is nicely broken in by now.

2) Occasionally my phone's display has gotten garbled.  But I'm fast and 
crazy and running with the beta firmware.  Some of the stuff in 3.60k  
beta made subscribe/notify seem to work better, but both 3.60k and q 
both garbled the screen.  3.60l seems stable, though.  The worst is the 
occasional inexplicable screen clearing events.  It _seems_ like the 
phone is still fine, but it has forgotten about the screen entirely.  
Again, I think that's a beta firmware issue.

3) Related, Snom releases new firmwares for free on a fairly regular 
basis.  Which is good and bad.  Read it as you will.

4) Snom seems to pay attention to this mailing list, they've answered at 
least one of my questions already.

5) The screen seems..  Underutilized.  I mean, right now I have 4 button 
labels, a big analog clock and date, my line appearance and a slightly 
goofy snom.com logo.  Incoming calls do a little song and dance, but it 
seems like you could do more with the display and rely less on the hard 
lights.  OTOH there would be an application break from the 190 firmware 
for doing this.

6) There are still the odd little corners where there's some polish 
missing - e.g. usually the display indicates which button mode you're in 
(abc, ABC or 123), but you find yourself in places where it doesn't.  
Usually after you've changed modes to deal with the occasional password 
issue.

7) Odd personal complaint, but snom hasn't learned the trick of tucking 
a pound of iron away in the base of the phone to make it seem more 
sturdy that I like out of telecomm products.

8) Memory?  I've started seeing low memory warnings with 2 line 
appearances and under 30 phone book entries.  (fortunately project 
Ghetto Queue failed to work and I went back to a single line..)

    For the most part I'm really happy with them, though.  There's a 
learning curve, but what doesn't have one?  I say this as someone who 
hasn't touched any other hardphones, though, so take it with a grain of 
salt.