How come no one calls me? OR My life with Microsoft Phone
Written: Sep 25 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good range, sleek, reads email
Cons: old technology
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| mrisch's Full Review: Microsoft MP-900 900MHz Cordless PC Phone |
I installed the Microsoft Phone thinking it was the next best thing since sliced bread. I have since learned that it appears to have been invented at the time of sliced bread, and is appropriately moldy.
What is it?
The Microsoft Phone is a phone system and software that is intended to be full featured. The phone is sleek and black, and feels good in your hand. The phone sits on a charger that holds it nicely. There is a separate “base” unit that has a phone line and passthrough for modem that plugs into the computer.
There is an answering machine type package with basic answering machine features in software, and you can also check messages from the handset (the light blinks if there is a message).
Finally, the software allows you to use your computer as a phone. I have not used this feature, so I can’t talk about it. Don’t worry, though, I have plenty to talk about...
Voice Commands
One neat feature is that you can set up “speed dial” directories, and then dial them by voice from the handset. The voice recognition works remarkably well, though I improved it by doing phonetic versions of names.
A problem is that the system doesn’t work a lot of the time. If there is a reboot or other problem, it disables voice commands for some reason.
Dial-in
You can dial in to get your messages. It works like other answering machines, and an added feature is that it will read you your email, though it takes half an hour to get through a couple because it is slow.
One problem is that you have to sit and listen to how many messages you have before you can tell it what to do. This would be OK, except that the mail reading feature means it has to tell me how many tons of messages I have before I can ask it to play my messages.
Signal Strength
The phone is 900MhZ, and this is a strong point. I can routinely go out in the back yard and even down the street and retain signal. The battery, alas, does not last so long, and runs out if unplugged (even if unused) for a day or two.
Separation anxiety
One of the nice features of the phone is that the charger is separated from the phoneline base. This allows me to keep and charge the phone in the living room and still hook the phone up to my computer. Of course, this leads to “resyncing” of the phone with the base (which is easily accomplished by touching the two together) about once a week.
What was that? Pardon me? Speak up?
I don’t know what it is, but the volume on my phone is not very good. I find that I cannot have a conversation without muting the television. Ugh.
What kind of old technology is this?
One of the downfalls of this is that the phone base is connected to the computer via a serial cable. This means slow. This is the same slow technology that keeps modems from reaching any speed beyond a crawl. On the other hand, I have no USB, so who am I to complain?
Yet, this is indicative of the “old” technology in this device - the software has hardly been updated by Microsoft, and every time I install new network software from my Intel Anypoint, the product stops working and I have to reinstall it to get the old .dll’s reinstalled. What a pain.
Why is my hard disk louder than the phone ringing?
Whenever the phone rings, the hard disk grinds on my computer. Mind you, I don’t have a speedster, but I expect a P-II 233 MhZ computer with 64MB RAM and nothing running to have enough free RAM to answer the phone without 7 hours of hard disk cache grinding. This delay makes the answering machine portion slow to pickup quite often.
Hello? Is anybody home?
My computer would often freeze in Win95 if I (or others) called twice in succession. I suspect this has to do with the grind-o-rama described above, as the machine had not “recovered” from the last call. I know this because it shows an “incoming call” dialog twice on the frozen screen.
I will note that this problem has not surfaced in the last two weeks, when I upgraded to Win 98.
The ever growing message base
The way messages are handled is a bit weird and, in a word, yucky. First, they are stored in uncompressed .wav files (read huge). Second, they are stored in my Outlook Express (read slowing that program down). Third, and most bizarre, two deleted copies of every message are included in the trash can of Outlook Express. If I don’t go there to empty the trash, my hard disk gets full.
Further, if you press the message button on the phone, it plays the messages (through a loudspeaker on the phone, which is kind of nice), but then there is no way to delete the message from the phone!!!! So, every single call, every single message is now added to the pile of saved messages on the machine, until I go to the computer and relisten to them all and choose what to delete.
Fortunately, you can delete from the dial in access.
My suggestion?
Buy a good digital answering machine, and pay extra for the voice commands if you want it.
Recommended:
Yes
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