TITLE :Cisco LinksysCIT300 Dual Mode Internet Telephony Kit ASIN : B000GX9NV8 BRAND : Linksys PRICE: If not sure !!!!!! Check !!!!! Check Prices>> |
Most helpful customer reviews
49 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
CIT300
By B. Budlong
I have not been a Skype user for very long, but tired of using an attached headset and not being able to hear calls when not in my office.
The phone works well. Setup was not difficult. Pretty much plug and play.
SkypeOut and SkypeIn function properly. It's nice having my main line and Skype into one phone. Less stuff on the desk. I can easily make calls from either service (skype or main line).
There are a couple issues that I wish were fixed.
1.) The battery will not last overnight if it can not see the base station. So if you turn the computer off or too far away, the battery will drain really fast searching for the base unit. So you NEED to keep the phone on the charger overnight.
2.) All calls must be initiated from the phone and not the computer. So you can't call from the computer and then transfer to the phone. To call someone, you can search the skype contacts on the phone or dial direct. This is a little
annoying since my contacts are in Outlook and not skype. So everything needs to be dial directly on the phone.
Another small issue was Linksys's support. The beltclip came cracked. Linksys's support wanted me to return the entire package for exchange. It's a 15 cent plastic part that doesn't effect the use. I don't want to spend $12 in shipping to get a new 15 cent part. They were not very helpful.
44 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
Great sound, no Skype/landline call waiting, poor user interface
By JDM
Great sound, small and comfortable to hold.
But a big limitation is that it does not support call waiting / hold between Skype and landline calls, so if you are on the phone and the other type of call comes in, you must immediately hang up on your first call if you want to answer the incoming call on the same handset. It does support call waiting / hold between 2 Skype calls.
The strange menu and command layout seem to have been copied from a feature list with no usability consideration or testing. Here's what's bothered me most so far:
*It requires a tedious sequence of 3-4 key presses to get to the landline phone directory, Yet there are 3 different ways to get to the Skype directory by pressing a single key. Why not distribute those keys among other common functions, instead of having such redundancy / overlap?
* After you make a SkypeOut (i.e. Skype to phone) call from your Skype contact list, the "recently dialed" call list shows
only the phone number, not the name of the entry. Not very useful unless you have all your Skypeout phone numbers semi-memorized!
* Likewise, when calling a landline or skypeout number from a directory, the display shows only the number, not the name of the entry.
* When dialing, and also in the recently called list, phone numbers are not formatted (e.g. with dashes) to make them more readable.
* The recently dialed list does not include the time of the call, nor the duration, even though the phone includes a clock and a call timer. (You can go to a different menu (5-6 key presses away), to see the duration of the last call only, or the running totals of all dialled and received calls)
* Landline phone book entry names are at most 10 characters long, forcing constant abbreviation. 16 characters is standard and much more useful. Not quite as bad, but only the first 14 characters of skype directory entries are displayed.
* This is
not so unusual, but I'm spoiled: Menu commands do not have numbers by each item, so there are no shortcuts to get to a command, just lots of scrolling through menus and clicking where a single number press should suffice.
* You can't use SkypeOut to dial a number from your landline phone book.
* The following issue is (I think) also present on other brands, but it is still very annoying and unfriendly: even though this phone is connected to a computer (via its base station), you have to populate the landline phone book manually, one entry at a time, using the phone's keypad. You can't compose the phone directory on the PC and download it. (In contrast, the skype directory is maintained on the net and automatically copied from the PC into the phone).
I would hope that Linksys would release a firmware upgrade to correct some of these problems, but instead it looks like they've already released the CIT400 which also has the same lack of call waiting
between call types, though the interface looks (from the user guide) like it might be slightly improved.
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
voltage needs
By L. Neff
just FYI this product does not allow for 220V if you are trying to buy for overseas.