So, maybe six months ago the Sony cordless phone / answering machine we had gave up the ghost. Bummer. So, I went and got us a Uniden 5.8Ghz PowerMax extendible phone system. An extendible phone system is one where instead of buying more and more cordless phones and dumping them throughout the house, you buy extension phones that connect to your one cordless base station. The advantage is that you don’t need a phone jack as these guys have decent range - just a recharger cradle - and you can access base functions from any phone (e.g. listen to messages or copy the phone book). I thought at the time that in theory, I might buy another phone for the system, but really, at $70 a pop, I’ll probably just end up buying another cheap cordless phone if we ever need another one. As it stood, I wasn’t liking the $130 price tag, but I had a gift card for Best Buy from returning something there, so I went for it.
Flash forward five months. The cordless phone we have upstairs dies (probably due to Laura abuse… nice AT&T 5600 that had lasted me since ‘94), and so off I go to Best Buy to drop $70 on a new cordless expansion. Or a cheap cordless phone, depending on what I can find.
Lo and behold, the extension phones are on closeout for $9 a pop. Now, that’s a reasonable price… so I buy 4 of ‘em. I’m not sure what I’ll do with 2, but at $9 a phone, I don’t feel bad about having some extra phones around.
MK and I then start to notice some of the nicer things about these phones. For example, the Room Monitor and Intercom functions. *Boggle* hello, where did these come from? And why didn’t we know about them when we were using this crappy battery-powered monitor that never worked well anyway? And Intercom… normally in the evening, MK needs to yell at me when I’m upstairs at the computer or reading and she’s downstairs. Now, she can just use the intercom and get me… this is pretty sweet.
Now, I haven’t been impressed by mundane technology for some time, but I gotta say, this expandible phone system is pretty nice. It’s all screwed if that central base station goes (and when it does they’ll probably not be making 5.8ghz phones anymore), so I should probably look for that on clearance and get a backup, but otherwise, it’s a very nice, nice system.