It also provides enormous range - I took the phone more than a hundred feet without losing so much as a whisper.

Sound clarity was clearer than its rivals here, perhaps due to the use of DECT 6.0, which avoids the frequencies used by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A few minutes of use, however, and its quality spoke volumes. And there's something to be said for larger, more traditional handsets, especially in the home.Īt $120, the Philips VOIP3211S Skype cordless phone is more expensive than its similarly equipped rivals, and at first sight, it might be hard to see why: The Philips uses a similar handset to USRobotics' model, with an identical old-school, text-only display. Though the overall effect was to make it a little less easy to use, it's also a little cheaper, averaging about $10 less than the Linksys CIT300. The text-only display makes navigation cumbersome. USRobotics' contender, the USR9630, offered a chunkier handset. Both the other handset models bore more primitive, text-only visuals - though the text is, as a result, larger and easier to read.

The Linksys CIT300 Dual-Mode Internet Telephony Kit had the finest display of the three models, offering colorful background art and a fancy, cell-phone-like operating system.

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