BT Hudson Plus 1500 Single DECT Cordless Telephone with Answer Machine

I have found this phone excellent. It is easy to set up and operate and I like the feature of being able to transfer all the phone numbers I put into my primary phone manually in phonebook,being transfered to the other handsets at the touch of a button.The sound quality is good and I recommend this make and model. Also I think this is excellent for more senior purchasers like myself.

This is the latest in a long line of cordless phone systems in our home. We bought the one with 4 handsets and it is great. Signal and battery life good, menus easy to navigate and set up, loudspeak really is loudspeak so you can hear the other person, easy to copy your frequent numbers from one handset memory to the others, access to messages from any handset, not just the base and you can name the handsets so you know where each one goes and the internall call/transfer facility works well too (useful in a 4 floor house!). The only small issue we have is that the display is quite bright even when in standby mode so we have to turn off the handset in our bedroom at night, but it is no hassle, especially as it automatically turns itself back on in the morning by us putting it onto its charger. Would recommend it.

First of all I feel that I must qualify my credentials in that I have owned or at least had the chance to use a reasonable variety of DECT phones for the last 10 years or so. I say this as I am about to be fairly critical of the the BT Hudson 1500, having recently bought the quad pack (4 handsets). I am also a self-confessed gadget man so am used to playing with lots of techie stuff.

So what is good?
I'll start here as there are some good elements to these phones and I am keen to not appear as just a ranty middle-aged man.

1) Firstly the packaging is among the best I have seen. Everything is so neatly located in the very efficient box and almost lovingly protected. I actually thought I had been sent the wrong box given it's size and the fact I had gone for the four pack.

2) The aesthetics of the units. The look and feel is of robust quality. They look very smart in their cradles and also look like they would survive an accidental drop on my kitchen floor.

3) The quality of the button presses and tones are clear and reassuring.

4) Call quality is good, but not great.

So what is not to like?
This is where I may appear almost finicky, but there are some serious deal breakers, at least for me.

1) The ringtones. There are about 12 or so to choose from and they are all absolutely horrendous I am afraid. I am not an obsessive custom ringtone person (I use a standard ringtone on my mobile) however the ones on the BT Hudson come over more as a shriek than a ring. Add to that the distortion on each handsets speaker when they ring, one of my first tasks was to turn all the ring volumes down, just so they were clear. After that, we chose the one tone that didn't make our ear drums sore. As my partner works from home she needed it to be a tone that wouldn't be unpleasant to clients should the phone ring. We only had one serious contender and it still is not great.

2) Missed calls. This drives me so crazy, it is such a fundamental fail! If the phone rings and you answer it, the other three handsets each log it as a missed call. If you miss a call, all four handsets log a missed call. The only way I can then find to clear the missed calls is on each individual handset, list the missed call(s), open up each call item, then back out. Much like a text message notification and the only way to clear it being to open it up. This means that if we miss 4 calls in a day, I have to clear them on all four phones individually. That results in 16 button presses, per handset, so 16x4=64 button presses, for four missed calls. How crazy is that? Surely if I clear it on one phone, all the others should also clear? This is certainly how my old Panasonic DECT phones worked.

I have scoured forums and it appears this is not the only BT phones to suffer this fate. I have yet to find any way to get around it and definitely cannot see it described in the instructions. That is another thing, how un-intuitive must a phone be for me to even have to resort to looking at them?

3) The handsfree speaker quality is poor compared to my old phone.

4) Lack of headset phone jack.

5) The display brightness. When it is in the cradle it is very bright, which is fair enough. However once I have removed it and left it on my bedroom side table the dimmed display still does an impressive job of illuminating the bedroom! The only way to get past this is to either turn it off or cover it up, which kind of defeats the point. Also, it ensures that if left out of the cradle for any period the batteries go very flat, very quickly.

I saw all the positive reviews of these phones and thought great! However the reality for me is far from that. As a test manager I can safely say that the level of user testing of these units must be next to zero. I am returning them.