Which cordless phone is best

Plus, landlines and their handsets cost significantly less than their cell phone equivalents. Cordless phones require a steady stream of power to function. A good cordless phone base will have a battery backup for times that you lose power. Otherwise, it's not a bad idea to have a corded phone somewhere in the house as a backup in case you lose power. You can even go cord-free and work from home.

You can enjoy features like a 1,foot range, hands-free speakers, hours standby time and 4 hours talk time, noise-filtering technology, HD audio feature, and many others. While most cordless phone systems can be expanded, that's not always a given.

Even if a cordless system can be expanded, it's important to know how far you can expand. Will your system handle five handsets? What about twelve? It's important to know how versatile your phone system can get. We touched on this a little earlier, but we have a full explainer of the technology as well. Essentially, it's a standard in cordless phones that ensure that a phone has great range and call clarity.

Plus, DECT phones can intercom with each other and use VOIP, or internet telephony, services like Vonage or Ooma that will send your calls over the internet rather than via the traditional phone network. Cordless phones require a battery to function, which is why they require base stations to charge. It's important to consider your phone habits when choosing a cordless phone system.

It's also important to consider the layout of your home and places where a charging cradle would be convenient. Patrick Hyde lives in Seattle where he works as a digital marketer and freelance copywriter in addition to writing about technology for Lifewire.

His areas of expertise include Android devices and consumer technology, such as cordless phones for your home. Adam Doud has been writing in the technology space for almost a decade.

When he's not hosting the Benefit of the Doud podcast, he's playing with the latest phones, tablets, and laptops. When not working, he's a cyclist, geocacher, and spends as much time outside as he can. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. It includes one additional handset to place on the other end of your home.

This phone can expand to up to six handsets and enables you to have the hands-free experience with the duplex speakerphone. It offers voice paging, simultaneous announcements to every handset. Th is model stores up to 10 0 entries in the phone directory. The last useful feature of the phone is the option to monitor your baby in other room with the second handset.

The model has a large 1. T he phone is dust and water-resistant and has a backlit keyboard to help you see the numbers in low-lit rooms. It comes with one additional handset but it supports up to 11 handsets. The model has a wall mount and belt clip option. The ECO mode function saves the energy consumption. This system includes five handsets with a digital answering machine system and the ability to sync your smartphone to your cordless phone with Link2Cell Bluetooth technology.

You can easily make and receive cell phone calls through your Panasonic system with excellent clarity. This system allows you to sync up to two smartphones to add range and power to your office phone system. This Panasonic cordless system includes Noise Reduction to clearly hear your calls, even with ambient noise.

With Talking Text Sender Alert, the phone will announce the name or number of the caller. Moreover, it can connect to Siri, Google Now and S Voice with the Voice Assist feature and has up to entries ti the phone directory. You can have up to 12 hours of talk time when the power goes out due to the battery backup. This phone system is not lacking in any features you may need, whether you want the ability to store a nearly endless number of contacts in your directory, block calls, or connect your cell phones with a single touch of a button.

Looking for a reliable cordless system with enough handsets? The handsets have a heavier feel to them than budget models with an easy-to-use keypad.

The system has a visual ringing indicator if your system is silenced and it can be expanded to up to 12 handsets. The system works as a desktop phone or it can be mounted to a wall with the included bracket. Volume is completely adjustable and this model is compatible with hearing aids. Beyond the design there are plenty of great features, including a minute answerphone, speakerphone and a nuisance call blocker, which can be set to block specific numbers, withheld numbers or numbers with a certain string of digits.

Buy now from John Lewis. A high-power base station and sensitive external antenna give you a range of up to m indoors and up to a kilometre outside — although your actual mileage will naturally depend on walls and other obstacles. Features are fairly limited, but you get a number phonebook, a minute answerphone and basic nuisance call-blocking.

Sign up for our daily newsletter Newsletter. Best cordless phone Find the perfect landline phone for your home or office Best Buys. Stuart Andrews. Jonathan Bray. See related. Best printer The best inkjet and laser printers to buy. Best budget smartphone The best cheap phones you can buy in the UK. Retired audiologist Lisa Devlin tested the amplified phones in this guide. Devlin has non-syndromic, bilateral, congenital, mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss.

She uses two Oticon Opn S hearing aids and has prior experience with amplified phones. That means tens of millions of American households still have landlines, however. As a childless man who rarely makes voice calls of any kind and lives in an apartment that has decent cell phone reception, I was surprised to discover just how many of my Wirecutter co-workers own and regularly use cordless phones.

Other colleagues have poor cell reception in their homes and simply need something that can reliably make and receive calls. If you have a line anyway, why not get a phone to use with it? When we published a previous version of this guide, in , we noted that there were relatively few independent, trustworthy reviews of cordless phones. This made it tricky for us to narrow our latest list of test models, since the manufacturers that make cordless phones release dozens of similar models with only slightly different features.

So in an effort to zero in on the specific metrics and features we should look for, we reached out to groups whose members would likely have an interest in these devices, and we searched for hobbyists and enthusiasts. The same was true when I put in a request with SciLine , a resource for journalists to connect with scientific sources.

Next, we turned to the phone makers themselves. There are smaller brands, but for support and warranty purposes, we hewed closely to the larger brands. Complicating things further, many models are available only through certain retailers Amazon, Target, Walmart, and so on. Finding phones that fit our desired specifications and were actually available to buy was frustrating for us, and we do this sort of thing for a living!

To figure out which features and specifications were the most important, we gathered a group of Wirecutter staffers who had cordless phones and asked why they used them and what features they found most useful. We combined that feedback with our research to arrive at a list of criteria:.

Armed with the above criteria, we asked representatives from VTech and Panasonic which of their respective phones best fit the bill. After cross-referencing the suggestions against our own research, we called in 12 models:. We used the same criteria to research amplified phones, with additional qualifications specific to their intended purpose.

Once we had the phones in hand, we installed an Ooma Telo VoIP system—one of the more popular brands of boxes that turn your internet connection into a phone line—and began testing.

Some aspects were obvious from the start, such as how similar the hardware was across many of the models; other features, including range and voice quality, required us to evaluate them more thoroughly. We walked down the stairs, out of the house, and west down the street, continuing to listen until the call started to break up.

Thankfully, even the worst-performing phones made it several houses down the street about feet before the signal weakened. We then shared the voicemail recordings with three Wirecutter writers and editors and asked them to evaluate and rank the four clips the test phones were not identified to the panel.

Having verified that all three phones had good-enough voice quality, we simply navigated around each phone and played with its respective features to see how well they were implemented.

Were the menus easy to navigate? None of them were particularly great, but some were worse. How did the handsets and their buttons feel? How easy was it to read the screen? Retired audiologist Lisa Devlin performed similar tests with the amplified phones, allowing us to evaluate range and outgoing audio quality. Additionally, she made calls using each phone and toggled through the various settings intended to aid hearing, including the volume-adjustment options, tone control, slow-speech and noise-reduction functions, and any audio assist or boost buttons.

The package comes with two handsets, so you can have phones in different parts of your home.