Philips CD255

...phones on display and this Philips CD2551 caught my eye straight away, its lovely large size and modern looking base and a claimed 12 hours battery life, it was mine. Not forgetting it had an answering machine and a 100 person phonebook. How much did it cost? Only £29.99 for the single handset phone, there was also a set of 2 and 3.


==What is a cordless phone?==
***************************************

...
...fantastic condition. Thumbs up to Philips on their packaging but how do you set up this phone?


==Setting the phone up==
*****************************

This was a painless process that was done very quickly. First off the mains adaptor and telephone cord had to be plugged into the base, the lovely red light on the front comes on when plugged in and the phone is ready to be charged, the phone had to be charged ... more

Hello everyone and welcome to this review!

In Tesco the other night and had a phone call, ‘the house phone is not working, pickup a new one!’, great…. But what one? That’s when my mobile battery went and I was left to decide on my own. Off to the phone isle I went. We needed a cordless with an answering machine and a good battery life, I was getting somewhere!

There were around 50 phones on display and this Philips CD2551 caught my eye straight away, its lovely large size and modern looking base and a claimed 12 hours battery life, it was mine. Not forgetting it had an answering machine and a 100 person phonebook. How much did it cost? Only £29.99 for the single handset phone, there was also a set of 2 and 3.

What is a cordless phone?

***************************************

Well… It is simply a house phone without a wire, they are great! This particular phone is a digital DECT phone which ensures crystal clear sound quality and this particular phone has HD (High definition) sound for natural voice clarity. There is a 300 metre outdoors range and a 50 metres indoors range with most DECT phones. The calls are crystal clear whether you are 200 metres away from the base or right next to it. No static at all.

Anyway back to the phone! Time to unpack it.

The box looked very nice and definitely helped in my buying, it really stood out from all of the rest and looked simple and fancy. It’s a rather large box considering it is a one phone pack, but the phone is rather large at 161mm long. In the box I found;

The handset
Two rechargeable AAA batteries,
Base station with built in answering machine
Power plug
Phone line cable and instruction booklet.

All of this was extremely well packed to ensure it arrived in fantastic condition. Thumbs up to Philips on their packaging but how do you set up this phone?

Setting the phone up

*****************************

This was a painless process that was done very quickly. First off the mains adaptor and telephone cord had to be plugged into the base, the lovely red light on the front comes on when plugged in and the phone is ready to be charged, the phone had to be charged for 24 hours before use, I thought this was too long! My Siemens phones only required 8 hours, anyway that 24 hour period flashed by and it was time to start calling.

The phone is a fantastic size, it is big enough not to lose and not to big to put in your pocket. The phone was shaped just like a banana and is very nice to hold, it also fits your face very nicely unlike most phones. My first call was being made and I noticed the buttons were perfect in every way, they are nicely spaced out and cannot accidentally be pressed when on a call. Being made of a painted rubber means they can be easily wiped with a damp cloth, as I learnt that phones keypads can hold thousands of germs and viruses, eww!

Making the first call.

**************************

This was very simple as with most phones, just dial the number and press the green button, the number will dial and you get talking. The phone connects instantly and there is no painful wait for connection like our old phone. The connection was very good and the sound was fantastic, the phone boasts high definition sound and believe me, it really is! The person on the other end said they could hear me fine but it sounded a bit tinny compared to my old phone, just something to get used to I guess!

Thee phone call lasted a good two hours and the battery was still on full bars. The phone also has a standby battery time of 150 hours, this is basically the amount of time the phone can be left off the charger. That’s very good in my opinion, I would comment on that time but we always put the phone back on the base as we can never find it when ringing!

Special features

***********************

This phone has some very nice features that make it very easy and convenient to use,

Hands free speaker phone - Yay, something my old phone did not have! A speaker phone, most useful when cooking or if you cannot be bothered to hold the phone. I tried this and I must say…. I was very impressed! The sounds is fantastic and it comes out nice and loud. The sound is not as high definition when on speaker compared to the ear-piece but it is still very good. Most speaker phones are annoying use as the person on the other end cannot hear what you are saying, the usual answer to this is to scream at the person, but not with the Philips! The microphone picks up sounds really well on speaker and you can easily walk the room when speaking with the phone at the other side of the room.

Illuminated screen with caller display - How annoying is it when you answer the phone to someone that you do not want to have a conversation with? Very annoying! Haha, it really annoys me, not that I hate anyone but there are some people you just cannot put the phone down on. Well not with this beauty, this phone allows you to see who is phoning if you are subscribed to BT privacy package which is free to join. The screen also lights up which is fantastic if the phone starts ringing in the dark!

100 entry phone book - this is very useful, you can store 100 numbers in this phone with both the names and the numbers, just like a mobile phone really.

Answering machine - The answering machine on this phone is great, it has a real ladies voice and not some robot! It even tells the caller that it is an answering machine, ‘This is an answering machine, please leave your message after the tone’, that’s what it says! You can of course record your own if you wanted but I get embarrassed easily! Lol. The answering machine has a respectable 15 minutes recording time.

Phones looks and other functions?

******************************************

The phone looks extremely modern and is a lovely silver and white colour, the phone is kind of banana shape and the base is kind of banana-ish! The are buttons on the phones base that look very stylish as they light up.

There are 10 ring tones available to choose from, what I like about this phone is that there is a normal ring tone that actually sound like a phone, there are also some fancy polyphonic tones but I do not like them as they are not as loud as the normal tones.

The phones screen is not a colour display, it is a normal black and white display which is better in my opinion, the characters on the screen can be seen with ease and the numbers are very large.

Any problems with this phone?

***************************************

There is one annoying thing I have found with this phone! That being that the base station does not ring. Only the handset itself rings when you have a call so if the handset is upstairs and you are down…. You will be missing that call!

This can be seen as both a good and a bad thing, there is nothing more annoying than going to the base that is ringing with no phone on it, but it is even more annoying in my opinion when you miss the call totally, but the phone does tell you if you have a missed call displaying the number which makes up for this problem somewhat.

The phone can also sometimes display flat battery even though it has just come off the charger, it is not flat but likes to think it is! This is probably a fault with my unit but I cannot be bothered to take it back! We like it too much.

But that is about it for the faults of this phone, there are not many but I have to knock one star off the rating as these things can cause annoyance at times, there is also a lack of a belt clip.

Overall we are all extremely impressed with this Philips phone, it provides everything that we need in a phone and it even allows you to add up to 5 more handsets, we attached our old phones to the base station and we have them around the house. This phone looks really great and the battery is fantastic, the sound is absolutely amazing and is worth every penny. The phone makes it around every room of our house and does not have any annoying interference or noises, I highly recommend! Definitely made the right decision in Tesco that night…

Thanks for reading, sorry if I have bored you!
Nickbrown60. 

...less