When our old house phone eventually died, having buttons stick and generally becoming annoying, we shopped around for a new set of phones, and eventually purchased the BT Graphite 110 set, which consists of two handsets, 2 base units, 2 power leads (one for each base), and 2 rechargeable batteries.

~~Price~~
The BT Graphite 1100 twin set varies in price, but we paid £31 for our set from a local electronics shop. You can buy these in pairs as we did, although if you have a bigger house or just want more phones, they can also be bought with 3 and 4 headsets. Similarly, if you have a small house, you can buy just 1 headset. Prices obviously depend upon how many headsets you buy too!

~~Looks~~
I was first attracted to this set by the way it looked, and I think the phones and their bases are stylish in appearance. The handsets are sleek and black in appearance, and are also quite small in size compared to some home phones I've seen. The buttons are clear and have a good gap between then, which I think is much better than having tiny buttons which you end up pressing several of when you only want to press one! The buttons are clearly marked with their purpose e.g. the number keys, mute, redial etc, and it's pretty self explanatory.

The base units are circular in shape, and are quite small compared to the phone. They are nicely rounded and have the same shiny black look that will blend in nicely with most houses.

~~Use~~
Once set up, with the base units set to charge up the phones, which run on mains power but have their own battery reserve for when you want to wander around, and if the electricity goes off for a bit etc. There is a telephone lead which you plug into your phone point, and after that, you're pretty much set up to start making and receiving calls.

If you want to use some of the other functions, you'll have to put a little effort in, but it's worth it. Firstly you can programme up to 50 names and numbers into the phones internal phone book, meaning that you can use it much like a mobile phone. Like a mobile, the number of the person calling you is displayed on the LCD screen when they ring, but if you have that number entered into the phonebook under a name, the name will display instead. Programme your mum's number in and when she rings, it will display 'Mum' for example.

The phone is also adjustable on a number of levels, including the ringtone and the volume, which needs to be quite high I've found in order to have a good volume of conversation. You can also enter the time and date which is also displayed on the LCD screen.

One great feature is that you can make internal calls between the phones. This doesn't make much difference in our house as we're generally all near enough to each other to give each other a shout if we need to, but in larger houses I think this would be a much welcomed feature. You could call someone at the other side of the house for free pretty much like a walkie talkie, and I really like this feature.

I've found the battery lasts ages when the phones aren't on the base, we've left them off overnight and most of the next day and the battery had not gone flat.

~~Overall~~
I have found the BT Graphite 1100 to be a very good phone for use in our household. It not only looks nice, but has the amount of functions we need on it - it's not too complex, but similarly, it's not just a bogstandard phone. For the price, I think it is a good buy and can recommend it a lot.