BT Response 123 telephone/answering machine (Other Answering Machines)

Member Name: Hope

Product:	Other Answering Machines
Date:	29/01/01 (599 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good functions in theory

Disadvantages: Doesn't work in practice

Don't buy this telephone answering machine unless you want to be let down as we were. In the medium price range, and produced by BT, we did not expect any trouble but how wrong we were.

True, it has some good functions including 11 minutes of digital recording, message indicator, memo facility, remote facility, volume control, 10 memories and so on. However, we bought it in October and by December it was behaving very bizarrely indeed. To our great inconvenience, it failed to record important incoming messages and gave no indication that there had been any. Our first indication of any problem was when I phoned in myself using the remote function (excellent in theory) only to hear the engaged signal over a period of several hours.

By the time I arrived home, I found not only the answerphone dead but the phone too. None of the buttons responded to touch so we were unable to switch the machine either on or off and yet an old, presumed deleted, message suddenly blared out of its own accord! Worse still, our line was not active again until we had unplugged the Response 123.

We returned the answerphone to Argos where there was no problem at all in exchanging it for another one. Still trusting in BT, we chose the same model again, took it home, recorded a message, phoned into test it and found this one was faulty from day one! It was bleeping randomly and the bleeps were cutting out both the recorded message and the incoming message. Clearly BT have not got the hang of digital recording.

Needless to say, we have exchanged it for another model, £10 cheaper and much better.

Summary: