Great sound, great user interface, great features. Let’s see if it lasts…
Written: Aug 15 '04 (Updated Feb 13 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Call quality, user friendly, mobile speakerphone, two handsets
Cons: Small message recording capacity
The Bottom Line: With good sound quality, intuitive menus and buttons, all the features you could want, two handsets with speakerphone capability, and built-in digital answering machine, what more could you ask for?
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| ceconrad's Full Review: Panasonic KXTG2344 2.4 GHz Twin 1-Line Cordless Ph... |
Update: As of today (13 Feb 09) this phone is still working, though I've had to replace the batteries just recently.
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Original review:
It took Panasonic a long time to resolve the deficiencies with its 2.4 GHz phones, but I think we finally have a winner. It’s almost like they read my reviews…
Call quality
This phone has excellent call quality in both directions (i.e. what you hear and what the other party hears). A very similar Panasonic phone, the KX-TG2224, only one generation older than this one, sounded fairly bad according to many people “on the other end”. See this review: http://www.epinions.com/content_151455436420. But the 2344 sounds great.
Frankly, the first couple of cordless phones I had, dating back more than ten years now, also sounded great, and I may have never moved into the 2.4 GHz realm in the first place. Contrary to popular believe, a higher frequency does not necessarily equate to better range, in fact quite the opposite. However, what the higher frequencies are good for is obstacle penetration. I moved into a high-rise condo apartment building made of steel-reinforced concrete, with steel-studded interior walls. My regular 44 MHz cordless phone would barely work one room away from the base station, let along out of the apartment, whereas the 2.4 GHz phones sound flawless in any location.* (What’s the difference you ask? If you remember your high-school physics, you'll recall that the length of a wave goes down as the frequency goes up. In a manner of speaking, the 44 MHz waves were too large to "fit" through the gaps between the wall studs and rebar, but the 2.4 GHz waves squeeze through just fine.)
* - The one exception is when brought close to an operating microwave oven. Though I have no reason to believe my oven leaks excessively, the small amount of microwave EMR emitted by my oven interferes noticeably with the 2344. I think this is because microwave ovens run at a similar frequency. The effect of this is not as bad as it was with the 2224, however.
This phone features a hands-free speakerphone mode that works at the handset instead of at the base station, making it easy to conduct a speakerphone call anywhere in the house. As with most phones that are not actually dedicated conference phones, the microphone pickup is not really great, so you’ll still have to be quite close to the phone for the remote party to hear you very well. However the speaker is reasonably loud and this is a handy feature for waiting on hold without having to hold the phone to your head the whole time.
There is one feature that is worth noting because it’s so cheesy. Panasonic is currently pushing its Voice Enhancer technology, which claims to make a call sound more natural by filling in some sound in the frequencies that get chopped off by a telephone line’s limited bandwidth. Well, it’s a good thing this feature is off from the factory by default, because it doesn’t sound more natural at all. It sounds artificially enhanced, such that some callers hardly sound like themselves. One could argue it does sound better (natural or not), and I may still mess with it from time to time (they make it very easy to toggle this mode on and off during a call), but at first the effect is disconcerting, and I wouldn’t buy this phone just because of this feature.
Case/Design
There is nothing ground-breaking about this phone’s physical appearance, thank goodness. I’m getting tired of some of the extreme designs out there. This one looks quite conventional. It is light and comfortable to hold, and not too small. It features a lighted keypad and LCD screen.
Panasonic makes no claims with respect to resistance to shock or water or any such thing. It’s just a normal phone that appears to use very tried and true technologies in its assembly. The most commonly pressed buttons (the numbers) are also made out of a harder plastic that appears to be a bit more durable than the normal black rubber buttons. (I’m not sure this was actually a durability design decision, though; it may have been because the number buttons had to be made out of this harder translucent plastic for the lighted keypad feature to work.)
Battery life
The 2344 comes with a rechargeable 3.6V 830mAh NiMH battery that they claim lasts for 11 days on standby. I’ve only had the phone a few days, but the on-screen battery display still shows full power. Time will tell.
Durability
I can’t comment on this yet, as I haven’t had the phone long enough. However, from my experiences with two other Panasonic phones, the 2224 and the KX-TG2550 (see http://www.epinions.com/content_59814743684), I have reason to be skeptical. I’ll update this section if something goes wrong.
User interface
Finally, Panasonic has come up with a well-thought-out user interface that makes the phone a pleasure to use. Many of the deficiencies of the 2550 were fixed in the 2224 (such as the addition of pre-dial, context-dependent soft keys, and better menus), and then for the 2344 they fixed a few more things, including the addition of one of my favorite features, which Panasonic calls “Personalized Name Display”.
Here’s how Personalized Name Display works: The phone compares the phone number of an incoming call to the numbers in the directory for a match. If a match is found, the phone displays the name you have entered instead of the name transmitted by the phone company. This is useful for calls from cellular mobile phones, which typically display a number but no name, and for calls from lines for which the listed name is not as familiar as some other name you'd rather have show up. Both my old Nortel cordless phone and all cellular phones I have used have this feature, but until the 2344 none of the Panasonic cordless phones I have tried had it.
Unlike the old Nortel phone, you don’t tell the 2344 what your local area code is, so I’m not sure how it matches the incoming call 403-234-5678 against the 234-5678 stored in the directory, but it does. I guess that means that it is just doing a match based on the last 7 digits. If so, I guess an incoming call from a 212-234-5678 would also match (incorrectly) against the 234-5678 stored in the directory. But I suppose this would be a rare occurrence.
The 2344 also features easy-to-navigate menus and context-dependent soft buttons below the display. The software makes extensive use of a large up-down scroll button, making it easy to navigate through lists.
The 2344 also features a dedicated redial key, which was missing on the 2224.
The phone offers all the now-standard display-phone features, including a deluxe call-waiting display menu* that gives you on-screen options for an incoming call (e.g., switch, send to voicemail, play an "I'm busy" message, etc.). The menu is activated by pressing the Call Wait/Flash button a couple of seconds after hearing the call waiting tone. This isn't quite a slick as you might think, though, as (a) you must be careful not to push the button too soon after hearing the tone, or the phone will not have received the data from the phone company about who's calling, and (b) it still requires you to tell your party to wait a second, since you must remove the phone from your face to check the display, which normally rests against your cheek just as with cell phones. So all in all, the visual call waiting is not as neat as with the full-sized desk phones, with which the other party might not even notice you're getting another call.
* - You must subscribe to your phone company's visual call waiting service for this menu to work. You also need to activate the feature in the phone's setup menus.
Directory
The phone has a pretty standard directory that allows you to store up to 30 entries of up to 32 digits each, each with a name up to 16 characters long. You can program pauses into the phone numbers for dialing into services that require timed responses to voice menus. Entering and editing text is fairly straight-forward, and I entered about 15 entries, complete with names, in less than 10 minutes. Each handset is able to transmit its phone directory to the other handset. This works in an additive, non-destructive way, so that there is no fear of deleting numbers that may be on the destination handset but not on the sending handset. Essentially, to make the directories in both handsets the same, you can simply transfer the directory from handset 1 to handset 2, then send handset 2’s directory (which will now contain all the numbers that it had before, as well as all the numbers from handset 1) back to handset 1). The phones also allow you to send just a single directory entry instead of the whole directory.
Caller list
The caller list is accessible with one touch and keeps the last 30 numbers that called. The phone stores the number of times each number called, the date and time of the last call from each number, and of course the name and number itself. In addition, each handset keeps track of which numbers you did not answer on that handset and flags them as new calls. From the caller list you can return the call or save the number to the directory. Returning the call can be a bit tricky if you need to edit the number before calling back (to add digits to the start, for example). The phone offers a one-touch rearrange number feature that does things like adding a 1 to the start and adding or removing the area code, but this may still be insufficient for some applications, such as if you need to add 9, *70, 011, or some other prefix to the number. In this case you'd need to just make a note of the number and dial the whole thing in by hand. (Some other phones allow you to edit the number on the screen with more flexibility before dialing.)
Two Handsets
Multi-handset packages are becoming very common now. In fact, two handsets was not even a requirement of ours; we chose the phone based on other criteria. The fact that it had two handsets was just a bonus. However, beware of some models (such as some made by Uniden) that do not allow both handsets to be used on the same call at the same time. The Panasonic handsets work as you’d expect an extension phone to work: They can both be used at the same time on a call.
Answering Machine
I suppose the built-in answering machine deserves a mention also. As is also becoming standard, this is an all-digital tapeless model. Unlike many earlier digital answerers, though, this one actually records calls with enough fidelity that it sounds as good as the old tape machines. (The first digital answering machines just sounded horrible. So much for progress.) The high quality comes at a price, though. With the machine set to its high-quality record setting, there is only enough memory to record 5 minutes of messages. This isn’t a big deal for me, but if you wanted to use this for a small business or if you have a busier family than ours, it might be insufficient. (The standard/low quality level, still useable, yields about 10 minutes of recording time.) The machine employs non-volatile flash memory, which means that it will retain the messages even with no power. The unit also features built-in outgoing messages (greetings) that sound great, so you don’t have to waste any of the flash memory for your greeting if you don’t want to. We think the built-in announcer sounds better than us anyway, and adds that enigmatic, impersonal touch that we like (we’re introverts), so we just use the built-in one.
Message retrieval is super easy, and can be accomplished at the base, at either handset, or from anywhere in the world with a touch-tone phone. The machine features voice prompts somewhat like the voice menus in voicemail systems, so you don’t need to carry around a little card reminding you what key sequence to press to retrieve your messages!
One of my favorite features that appears to be new to the 2344 (it was missing on the 2224 anyway) is the ability to silence the ringer for any given incoming call. If the phone rings and you look at the display and decide not the take the call, you can press Off and the ringer will stop ringing! The caller will still hear the phone company’s ring signal as normal, and after the normal number of rings the 2344’s answering machine will pick up the call and take a message.
I mustn’t forget the cute lighted antenna tips: If you have a message waiting for you, the tip of the handset antenna blinks red. For some reason this feature is off by default, but it’s easy enough to find it in the menus and turn it on. (There is also an LCD display on the base that displays the number of messages, and a red light than blinks if there are new messages.)
Conclusion
All in all, this is a great phone set. I think Panasonic has finally put together a great package of features with a sensible easy-to-use design, and the sound is great. I just hope the physical quality of the device is better than I’ve come to expect from Panasonic phones. If it is, I’ll be very happy indeed.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
ceconrad
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Member: Chad Conrad
Location: Calgary, AB, Canada
Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 4 members
About Me:Husband, father, pilot, and business systems analyst. See my bio.
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