DECT: the technology that taste forgot

By Mary Lojkine on 18 March 2005, 11:44am

Last weekend we went shopping for a box of DECT cordless phones. It was a nightmare and we've decided this whole category isn't working for us.

We used to have a pair of DECT phones. The first one got sick and died, and then the second one got lonely. Then it stuck up two fingers, got sick and died too. We rang the manufacturer, who grudgingly admitted that we could send them in for repair, but we shouldn't, because it would be cheaper to replace them. So we did the ecologically unfriendly thing and went looking for new phones from any other company (you'd think people would realise that when they tell you to replace your dead-before-its-time product with a new one, your brand loyalty is going to leap off a tall building -- and not in a parachute-concealed-in-a-rucksack, base-jumping kind of way).

We started in High Street, where we found a random assortment of phones, arranged in no particular order, in loose association, with price tags referring to a random (but different) assortment of phones. It doesn't help that the model names are all variations on Alphabetti Spaghetti XR2759P. Why can't companies come up with product names that mean something?

Switching to the Internet, we found the same general disorder. In the BT Shop we were confronted with over 70 products and no easy way of zeroing in on the ones that met our basic requirements. And that's before we started looking at phones from Panasonic, Philips et al. At least the price tags were attached more firmly in the on-line shops.

All we wanted was a three-pack of phones that (a) worked and (b) weren't unspeakably ugly. Unfortunately DECT phones are trapped in a mid-90s mobile-phone styling timewarp. Apart from Bang & Olufsen's absurdly expensive BeoCom 2, there's nothing you'd be proud to have in your office, let alone your living room. Even our toaster has more pizzazz than the average cordless phone.

We crave a DECT phone with the show-off styling of the Motorola V3, the Apple iMac G5 or the Sony Vaios. If you find one, let us know. -ML