Cordless phones

What's behind our cordless phone Ratings?

• Overall score
  This score is based primarily on voice quality, ease of use, talk time, and range. For phones with an answering machine, overall score also includes mainly the message voice quality, answerer ease of use, and recording time. The displayed score is out of a total of 100 points. Phones are listed in performance order, within categories. Due to test upgrades, results may vary from past Ratings.
• Voice quality
  Voice quality considers listening quality which reflects what you hear and talking, what's heard by other phones. Tests were conducted in a quiet environment.
• Phone ease of use
  This score mainly covers handset weight and comfort, talk time, ease of phone setup and use, readability of labels; accessibility, location, and size of controls and buttons; and other convenience factors, such as auto talk, any key answer, lighted keypad, one-touch dial, and others.
• Range
  This score reflects the tested distance a phone can maintain an intelligible conversation, make a call and receive a call. We report a score instead of a distance because range can differ greatly due to variables such as phone base location, home size, room configuration, construction materials, multiple stories, wiring and other electrical and physical interferences. A low scoring phone is more likely to have some connection problems at short distances such as between different floors in a house or when going outside the house while a high scoring phone is less likely to have connection problems and can typically keep a clean signal in all but the largest of homes or when you go outside your home.
• Message quality
  This score reflects the judgment of an expert jury listening to playback of a message recorded from a corded phone of high-quality voice recordings in a quiet, acoustic environment.
• Answerer ease of use
  This covers ease of setup and use; adequate labeling, size and location of buttons and controls; and other convenience factors, such as the ability to play new messages first, to not erase unplayed messages, and the presence of advanced playback features such as slow, fast, and rewind.
• Recording time
  Our measurements, to the nearest minute, of total recording time using continuous speech. Cordless phones of all types are available with a built-in answering machine that has digital message storage, typically 15 to 20 minutes. In many cases, recording time may include not only incoming messages, but greetings, memos, and saved messages, so the total may be misleading. Most answerers maximize capacity by detecting pauses in a message and not storing them in memory to increase recording time. Recording time with an asterisk (*) is manufacturer specification. "NS" indicates not stated.
• Number of cordless handsets included
  The number of cordless handset(s) with a charging cradle included with the product.
• Maximum no. of cordless handsets
  The manufacturer stated maximum number of cordless handsets that can be registered to a multiple handset capable phone. A phone that can support up to eight handsets, for example, can have eight handsets registered to the base, but you may only be able to use four at once, say two using handset to handset intercom, while two others conference with an outside party. Others may just allow one handset to be used at a time, so can't be used like an additional (extension) phone you have connected to the same phone line. NA represents not applicable. See Buying Guide for more information.