Badly made, might work OK for a bit... (Synergy series)

Member Name: zero

Product:	Synergy series
Date:	17/07/01 (953 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: inexpensive, good sound

Disadvantages: doesn't actually work for long, nonexistent quality control

This opinion is about the Synergy 2120 DECT telephone.

I can’t recommend this phone too lowly. This is the most damning review I have written for Dooyoo.

I am displeased with this product. Unfortunately for BT, this is based on a larger-than-usual sample of set – five in fact. As you will know, each set consists of a base station and a handset.

I buy four sets originally (at John Lewis in London, so they weren’t seconds or anything). The first bad news was that one is faulty. As soon as she sees it, my eleven year old daughter says “the display on this one looks different”. She was right – the handset iss so “different” that it never charges or works at all. It is completely Dead on Arrival. It could NEVER have passed a quality check. So much for BT quality control…

John Lewis replaces the faulty set without complaint, and I eventually configure them all to work from one base station (not brilliantly easy, but I have known worse). A minor disadvantage of this product is that all the handsets except for the first show “Base 2” in the centre of the display; the handset identifier (“HS 2” or “HS 4” or whatever) is stupidly tucked away in the top right of the display – ergonomic: not.

Anyway, the handsets work fine. The sound quality good, I like the belt clip and so on. Handset nice and light, easy enough to use. Generally all round fine.

Then after a few months the base station stops working. I spend the required hour or so moving everything and re-programming all the handsets to work with one of the other base stations.

Now it all works again. For a few more months.

Then the problems start to multiply. First, the ringing tone plays up. The tone I carefully selected from the generously-programmed list plays correctly only once for each incoming call, then is curtailed to a plaintive bee
p-beep for subsequent rings. This affects all the handsets, so I deduce it is (yet) another base station problem. Then the sound starts breaking up on some conversations. This is intermittent, sounding like a loose wire, but because it is intermittent I haven’t troubleshooted (troubleshot?) it yet. And now, worst of all, the system develops a habit of ringing after I hang up on an incoming call – sometimes. Honestly, I finish a conversation, say goodbye, hang up, and the phone rings…

So, five sets: one never worked, two base stations became faulty within a few months and three other intermittent unexplained faults, each very annoying.

I begin to see a pattern though. The first BT product I bought was an answering machine. It simply stopped working after a few months. I am now on my second BT answering machine; this still works, but it is a bit overenthusiastic: it often - but intermittently - cuts in on the first ring, before I can answer... aaargh...

Dooyoo agree that the quality of these systems is bad enough to warrant my first ever one-star rating?

Summary: