Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Short review: this phone is great if you live with someone who wears hearing aids or has significant hearing loss. Longer review: My wife and I have been searching for a new house phone since our trusty vtech finally called it quits. My wife has pretty severe hearing loss and as a result wears powerful hearing aids in both ears. Because of this finding a new phone has been fairly problematic. Her hearing aids have a "telecoil" setting that's supposed to make them work better with phones. If the phone supports it, she claims that it makes a lot of differnce. Herein lies the problem, you don't know if the phone works with her hearing aids until you test it out. We have tried a lot of cordless phones marketed towards people who are hard of hearing and most of them just amplify the heck out of the sound at the cost of voice clarity. Worse still, most use cheap or substandard amplifiers that actually cause problems with my wife's hearing aids. She says they "buzz" which doesn't surprise me given how they are achieving the high decibel rating. Desperate to find a phone I started scouring amazon once again. Most of the other phones I had purchased before were in the $50 range which, while expensive for a cordless phone was less than the more expensive phones Like This one. I finally decided to suck it up and buy this phone by clarity. The reviews were mostly positive and it seemed like a quality phone. It arrived on time and was packaged well. We hooked it up in place of our current phone and tried it out. My wife says that this phone works flawlessly with her hearing aids. Best of all since the phone supports the telecoil mode, we don't really have to turn it up that loud. That being said, this phone can get ridiculously loud. The ringer and earpiece can both be set to loudness settings that might scare the bejees out of you in the middle of the night if you forget to set it to a lower volume (like me.) There are also multiple tone settings that are really great at improving the voice quality. The phone also supports another feature that I didn't even know I wanted: the base itself had a battery. If the power goes out, you can still use this phone! Most cordless phones become paperweights during power outages, so you have to hope that you cell phone still works, which it might not. Or you have to keep a hold of the wired phone "just in case." This phone worked fine during a power outage we got shortly after I installed the phone. I didn't even know about the base battery until then! As for the other features, this phone is pretty standard fair. It has a call history and address book. It has speakerphone and lights up when you call it. Most of the "expensive" stuff had obviously been put into making a phone with superb voice quality and I can tell you that it's not wasted. If your looking for a phone that has all of the features of a high end cell phone, this isn't what you want. But if you want a good solid phone that's easy for you or a loved one to hear on, this phone is worth the extra expense.