Thx Alan for this great piece of work! The original review can be found here:
www.theopensourcerer.com

Last week I (Alan) purchased a triple set of the brand new Siemens Gigaset S685 IP telephones. This is a DECT home telephone system with support for both PSTN and VOIP services. I’d spent quite some time looking for a decent replacement for our aging and now unreliable existing DECT handsets.

I bought these from a UK based on-line telephone vendor DSTelecom and their service and price was very good. I’d been waiting for this model to become available for a couple of months and they were offering the best price and the were first to get them in stock too!

There were a few reasons I selected these Siemens phones, but the main one is their ability to act as a basic telephone switch between handsets and incoming services. The Base unit can support up to 8 incoming services: 1 x PSTN, 1 x Gigaset VOIP Network, and 6 further VOIP (SIP) services.

This is the latest release and the handsets support very high quality voice between each other and on compatible networks. They also support Bluetooth so you can use a wireless headset and upload/download your mobile phone’s address book etc.

Here’s my personal review of these new phones for use in our home network.

My initial impressions: Nice packaging and a good looking handset.

There are very easy to follow 1st time instructions that get the system installed and running. Once I’d plugged the phones in and got them charging, and base station in to the LAN, the phone started showing me the weather forecast in Lisbon! :-)

Once the physical install is done, you can do almost everything else from the web based interface of the base station. I’ll cover that in detail in a minute.

But first the handsets. When you get them you need to do a first time charge and discharge cycle. The batteries are supplied (a pair of AAA rechargeables). The first full charge took between 3 and 5 hours depending on the handset. To discharge them all, I made internal calls between the phones and put them all on handsfree. It took a good 8-10 hours for them to get fully discharged. So talk-time is excellent.

The first thing my wife commented on when we were talking internally was the voice quality. She said it was brilliant! And having now just had a conversation with her somewhat hard-of-hearing father, he also attested to the much better sound than our previous telephones. So that’s good!

They have a nice big colour screen where you can - apparently although I haven’t done this yet - add pictures to your directory so the phone shows the caller’s face or avatar when ringing.

Anyway, all-in-all my initial impressions of the system was very positive indeed. Now let’s look at how the whole DECT/VOIP thing is configured and what really makes these stand out for a home phone…

Accessing the Web based user interface was easy. Here’s the login screen you first see (Just click on the pic for a bigger image):

The full review continues here:
www.theopensourcerer.com