Scott wrote
Mark Allread wrote
Dave Plowman (News) wrote

Which bashing has always been a popular sport. I
haven't subscribed for ages, but when I did usually
found their best buy just fine for what I wanted.

Don't make the mistake I made by following their
'best buy' for landline phones (Gigaset). They are still
on sale and still in the shops as a Which best buy.

Poor speakers and very poor life expectancy for both the handsets IME.
They were cheap and we need them quickly but have now replaced them.

As a matter of interest, what life would you expect for a cordless phone?

Decades.

I assume you considered replacing the batteries?

I havent needed to with my Panasonic KX-TCD735ALMs,
in decades. They do have replicable AA NiMH batterys and
I bought them because they have those, but havent needed
to replace them. The charger is very smart and I have actually
charged some hard to charge AAs in the phones at times.

How do you know the speaker is bad and not the
microphone on the caller's equipment or the landline?

By getting the same result with all callers presumably.

It seems to me most poor quality calls are the fault
of the other person's equipment - either not holding
the mouthpiece close to the mouth or walking about.

But you are unlikely to have all callers doing that.

PS Psychologically, does speaking deliberately quietly
cause the other person to speak louder and vice versa?

I'm not convinced that with most modern cordless
phones that you can actually do that successfully. Most
will automatically attempt to adjust the mic gain.