Motorola MD761 5.8 GHz Digital Expandable Cordless Phone with Answering Machine and Caller ID (Black/Silver)

Rating:
Summary: Good features, marginal sound, horrible battery life
Review: I bought this particular phone because it has a lot of the features that I was looking for and I had had some good experiences with Motorola cellular phones. The features work well enough, but, well, the rest of the phone is severly lacking...

As has been noted by more than one reviewer, the speaker quality is surprisingly bad - especially so for a company that has been making communications gear for as many years as Motorola has. I was glad it had a headset jack - I was forced to use quite often.

The second annoyance, and the one that made me want to toss the phone onto the bay, was the battery life. After two months of intermittent use, I was finding that the handset batteries were running out after a day. According to the folks that I bought the phone from (and, yes, I didn't actually RTFM until after I started having problems), the handset cannot be stored on the base station because it will overcharge the batteries. This was a new one on me. I've had several wireless phones and this was the first one that had burned batteries this way. To make a very long story short, after long and arduous search, I never found a place that I could buy replacement batteries for this phone. Motorola wasn't much help, either.

To sum up, I'm *very* disappointed in this system. I had expected a lot more from Motorola.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: I bought this phone and then returned it after about 24 hours. I think other reviews here have been a bit kind on the audio quality. It is terrible. The phone chops off the first portion of all incoming audio. If someone is speaking slowly it chops off the first part of each word. For someone talking faster it is only the first word in the sentence, the rest sounds OK.

Otherwise the phone is fine but the audio quality made this phone a non starter for me.

Rating:
Summary: Okay, but inferior to competitors...
Review: I bought this phone for my second (business) line at home. I have an AT&T (VTech) phone for the house phone and this product suffers in comparison.

First the good stuff: this phone is attractive and easy to set up. The menus navigate easily and you program the base from the handset (none of this silly separate programming). The buttons and whatnot I think are better placed and the phone is nicer looking.

But...

This phone suffers from a number of limits that are annoying. The AT&T phone handsets work from throughout the house. This phone doesn't reach even half the distance before it produces noticeable static and weak reception and dies before I get to the backyard (yipes).

Battery life seems to deplete rapidly. Hour long conference calls are a test for the phone.

If you don't hold the phone directly over your ear, you can't hear it very well. The phone isn't shaped in a way to keep the earpiece centered naturally and I'm constantly having to shift the phone so I can still hear.

It does have a handset speakerphone, but the quality is fairly poor. I intend to try it with a headset.

The setup was easy, but it did take time for the programming to register with the base (confusing). Motorola's website can't seem to deal with this phone yet and it is nigh-on impossible to order accessories (like a headset) from it.

So overall an attractive phone, but you'd be much better off with the AT&T or V-Tech (they make the AT&T), which I highly recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Many great features and the worst sound quality
Review: I purchased this phone with two additional handsets. The unit is expandable to more handsets, and it has many great features. However, the sound quality is the worst of any portable or cell phone I have ever used. All callers tell me that I sound as if I was in a tunnel. They all say that either my voice is breaking up or that I'm not clear. Apparently, it goes both ways for I have to strain to hear them, and often I can no understand what they are saying. All three handsets sound equally bad. Relocation of the base unit and/or the handsets does not improve the sound quality.

Rating:
Summary: Should have been better
Review: The phone sounds clear and is easy to use, but the big problems for me are:

1. The phonebook entries cannot be copied to another handset (even though the manual says they can be, the option doesn't show up when using the product).

2. There are private phonebooks for each handset, and a shared phonebook that is kept on the base for use with each handset. The shared phonebook doesn't give you the option to sort it alphabetically. How dumb is that? It keeps the numbers in the order you put them in, with no way to change it but to delete them and re-enter. The private phonebooks can be sorted alphabetically - but you manually have to do that.

Imagine having to go around your house to every handset and entering 50 phone numbers and names. There shouldn't be anything but ONE phonebook in the first place. It needs to be kept within the base, in flash memory so that a power cycle doesn't take it out.

I'm returning it for a V-Tech. I had a V-Tech system for years with no trouble until I wore out the soft buttons.

Rating:
Summary: Good product with frustrating flaws
Review: There's a lot to like about this phone, but some poor design choices in the user interface make it needlessly complicated and frustrating to use.

I'm looking for a multi-handset system for my parents. They need large, well-lit buttons, good handset volume and voice clarity, and a clear and uncluttered user interface. This system gets 1.5 out of three:

The handset styling is an overgrown version of the "candy bar" style cell phones (offered, ironically, by all manufacturers other than Motorola). That aside, the buttons are well laid out, feel crisp and easy to use, and are clearly marked. The backlighting is very effective.

Unfortunately the menu system and display are not well thought out. Some examples: After answering calls, the most frequent thing you do with a phone is (duh) make telephone calls, presumably most often to the people in your phone book. Cell phone designers figured out long ago that just pressing the up/down scroll keys should put you right into the phone book - you shouldn't have to navigate a bunch of menus to get there. Unfortunately on this phone getting to the phone book to make a call requires pressing "PHONEBOOK", then pressing "SHARED", after which you're presented with the option to put a new entry into the phonebook (something you almost never do, and which should not be in the way of placing a call!). You scroll down a couple of lines and finally (whew!) you're ready to select someone to call.

As another reviewer reported, despite the manual's incorrect claim to the contrary, there is no way to move or copy items from the shared phonebook to the private ones, or to sort the items in the shared phonebook. The designers of the phone make you manage the shared and private phone books explicitly and laboriously, rather than doing the obvious thing and just allowing any entry to be marked private, but showing one integrated list on any given handset of the shared and local entries.

One more example of the small design mistakes that mar a product that had real potential: The display is of necessity very small on any phone, and so display real-estate is precious. The display on this phone can show five short lines of text. Why Motorola wasted one of them to provide a clock and calendar is beyond me. A bigger font for information I can't get from my wristwatch or microwave oven would have been a much better choice.

Last but not least, voice quality. This phone does a lot of background-noise suppression during silent periods. This can lead to a small amount of clipping at the beginnings of utterances - A small annoyance, but one that makes conversation slightly harder to understand. There is audible static in the background, but in fairness it's *very* much quiter than my Vtech 2461 2.4 GHz DSS phone system - the background hiss on that phone is pretty objectionable. However, no one would mistake the Mot system for a wired handset. Also, the max handset volume is borderline for my needs.

Bottom line: This phone is going back to the store tomorrow. It would be fine for teenagers or anyone who doesn't mind lots of menu-navigation. But it's not a good choice for someone who places a lot of importance on ease of use.


Rating:
Summary: TERRIBLE RECEPTION / SOUND QUALITY
Review: This phone's aesthetic design, ringtones, and lighting effects are awesome. It's just too bad that it flunks in a phone's most necessary area: voice clarity and reception. I returned mine and bought a Vtech that I am very pleased with. That's the second Motorola I returned due to poor sound quality.