Rating: 
Summary: Rating should be negative 10 stars
Review: Ordered this system through Amazon 2 years ago. NOTHING BUT TROUBLE. Wrong color phones in the box, which Siemens never replaced with the correct color. Started having warbling, gurgling transmissions within 6 months. Siemens advised to reset the system each time we complained, then after the warranty expired, refused to give us our money back because we had exceeded the warranty. After much complaining, they finally sent a refurbished replacement system, which began to warble and gurgle shortly after we plugged it in. Siemens refuses to give us our money back. Avoid this company and their products. They are not pleasant to deal with......
Rating:
Summary: Bad customer service, Bad phone
Review: First of all, like clockwork, Siemens phones fail at or after the warranty period. In the meantime, the battery system is unpredictably poor in performance. When you do have a problem, their customer service is very apathetic and you can bet you will receive a refurbished one to replace your defective unit. Don't believe me? Check out on websites how many refurbished units this company sells. I would suggest a Vtech or Panasonic.
Rating:
Summary: Snap Crackle Pop
Review: I haven't found much that doesn't interfere with this phones reception. The microwave and wi-fi leave me unable to talk. ... check these things first "before you buy this" . After 1 year I am now considering purchasing a new (but different brand) of phone. This guy wasn't cheap and I expected a lot better than I got for the money. This phone makes Radio Shack the quality leader in phone manufacturing.
Rating: 
Summary: Great yet complicated phone but missing obvious features
Review: I bought this phone to replace a few different cordless handsets, a seperate digital answering machine and a speaker phone in my home/home office. I am talking about the 8825 (as I can't believe that some other reviewers are.) Overall, this is a great system with a few caveats. Many people have complained about things like the inability to turn off ringers or answer certain lines from the handsets. This is almost exclusively due to the extremely poor documentation. If you are not "gadget inclined" DO NOT BUY THIS PHONE. It has many drill down menus which are poorly explained in the manual. You can only really understand them by doing some trial and error. As far as the quality goes, I have been quite impressed. The speakerphone has great sound BUT is not a full duplex as advertised. When you start speaking the other side cuts out. I live in an apartment building in NYC and have an 802.11b wireless set up. I doubt a more cordless phone hostile environment exists. That said, I have not really had any problems with reception - even while running the microwave. Occasionally there will be a click, but that maybe happens once a week or so and can't be heard by the person on the other side of the call. The downside of the system: It is missing several key features I would have expected on such an expensive phone system. I am going to list them below. Please keep in mind that I am fairly technically inclined, and have called Siemens to confirm that these features don't exist so you can be confident in my review: 1) There is no way to leave a memo on the answering system. For example, on most inexpensive answering machines you can push a button and leave a voice memo when standing over the machine. I find this really helpful if I want to leave a message for my wife and I know she will be calling in remotely to check the messages. 2) There is no way to transfer a call to any of the mailboxes after you answer it. The best you can do is to record the call. 3) The documentation is TERRIBLE! 4) If someone calls repeatedly, the caller ID log will only tell you the number of times they called and the time of the most recent call. You can't find the times of each individual call for the repeat dialer. 5) Although you can route certain Caller IDs to individual mailboxes, there doesn't seem to be a way to route all blocked or private caller IDs to a mailbox. You can only use the routing feature if the caller ID is in your directory. 6) The Caller ID announce feature is a gimic. It only is announced at the base station. Even with the volume all the way up, it isn't loud enough to be heard very far away. (Yes, the volume buttons are backwards.) 7) If you want to delete all messages, it requires drilling through several levels of menus. You can, however, use the delete key to delete an individual message while it is playing. (Maybe this is a safety feature to keep you from doing it accidentally.) 8) On the cordless handsets the volume can only be accessed by drilling through several menu levels. This makes it pretty useless as you have to take the phone from your ear to see the screen. In other words, you can't fix the volume without telling the caller. (This obviously isn't as much of a problem if you use an optional earpiece.) 9) There is no mute function on the cordless handset. There IS a hold feature, but that kills both the ability to listen or speak. There is a mute for the speakerphone though. 10) The call timer disappears as soon as you disconnect. This makes it difficult for an attorney to capture this info for a billing log. My old phone would leave the call time on the screen for about 10 seconds after the call. 11) The answering system does not have the ability to listen in on a room through the remote access. (Believe it or not, this is a usefull feature for me to call in and be able to hear if a print job has finished.) As I said, overall I am pleased with the purchase and can live without the missing features. The phone seems quite solid and I expect it to last for a long time. One plus is that Siemens includes an 800 number where they will answer any questions you have. A bonus on their 800 number is that it is really easy to get a human on the phone without getting lost in a sea of voicemail prompts. The phone has several features I haven't used, so there may be more shortcomings based on your own expectations. I guess the moral of the story is not to EXPECT this phone to have anything.
Rating:
Summary: Very disappointed in this product.
Review: Like many people, I work at home and purchased this system to use for both business and personal calls. Our house got hit by lightning last year and we lost 3 cordless phones so I was excited to find a product that seemed to offer more convenience. Unfortunately, the system has not worked well for my situation. First, it is not possible to initiate calls from Line 2 while using a handset unless Line 1 is already in use. I have assigned my home phone number to Line 1 and my business number to line 2. I can accept business calls from any handset but if I want to place a call, I have to return to the base unit or else the long distance charge will be on my home telephone bill. Second, the display on the handset is not programmable. Ideally, the display would show the extension number. Given the amount of money I spent on this system (plus 4 handsets), it is hard to believe that I had to write the extension numbers on the handsets with a sharpie to make sure that they aren't inadvertently left in the wrong room. My third complaint is a loud clicking noise when using the handsets. The manual says to move the base set away from other electronics but, give me a break... who's NOT going to locate the base set in the general vicinity of a computer or monitor? I have a laptop with a port replicator and even when I remove the laptop and turn off the monitor, the clicking noise persists. Finally, I can tell you that the programming options and menu options are anything but intuitive. Yes, if you have the manual in front of you, you can figure out how to retrieve messages on a handset, but don't try to remember how to do it without the manual or to explain it to anyone else in your household because they're just not going to get it. At this point, I'm almost hoping that our house will be hit by lightning again so that I can replace this system!
Rating: 
Summary: Siemens 8825 Gigaset improves on the 2400 series
Review: Siemens 2400 series 2-line system delivers great functionality for a busy house needing two lines. The *only* problem was poor sound quality, ie. the radio side of the product. It was unuseable. Siemens customer support replaced the 2400 systems 1x, this did not help. Even though warranty had expired, they agreed that an upgrade to the 8825 system was the right answer (we own a base station and 3 handsets). Siemens 8825 Gigaset does deliver improved sound quality. It is now a workable solution.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent 2 line phone
Review: This phone turned out generally as well as I expected. Only one glaring omission: The ringers for each line on this very expensive phone cannot be turned off individually, a feature found on the cheapest 2 line phone on the market. Especially exasperating since my previous phone did it, and our household requires it. This is the only reason I downgrade from 5 star.
Rating:
Summary: It was good while it lasted...
Review: I replaced the 2400 series with this 8800 series unit. At the beginning, I was so excited... This system sounds wonderful, has improved battery life, and sports a very solid build. But guess what, months down the road, all the problems started to hit. Display died on one handset, voice started to clip and gets choppy on another. The answering system started to malfunction-hanging up on people before they finish their messages. While much improved over the 2400 series, this newer system definitely has a set of problems of its own. Don't buy it! I've dumped over $... between the 2400 and 8800 series, but at the end, my old $... Panasonic analog sounds better and lasts longer. I guess the myth about German engineering and quality control is only a myth...
Rating:
Summary: Best value of the 2-liner cordless/desktop genre
Review: I had owned the 2420 previously, so I was a bit biased. It had it's faults, but overall was a good value. Probably the biggest thing I disliked about it was the handset holder... I was constantly finding out hours later that the handset had slipped and I was "offline" (blissfully ignorant of missed business). They fixed that with the 8825. The desktop unit has a better feel to it, and the LCD screen is much more readable now as well... the previous one had a yellowish tint to it and less of a slope, it seems. I don't use all 4 mailboxes, so I can't comment on that. I do miss the dataport, but simply got a 3-way 2-line splitter ($4) that does line 1, line 2, and line 1/2. It works good with my fax. Since I have distinctive ring on line 2, I have programmed the 4th mailbox (where distinctive ring calls get routed) with a message "If you are hearing this, the fax is not responding. Please call back at xxx-xxx-xxxx and leave a voice message". I also programmed the remote and desktop to use manual line select, so I can use either now... some reviewers commented about this, but it's pretty simple to set up in manual mode, and to use (1 extra step on the remote, dial the number then press which line you want to use). The audio quality of the outgoing message recordings is superior to anything I've heard. Flat and neutral, with very little hiss. I had tried to save a buck by using the AT&T 2462 2-liner, but it's OGM quality was about the same as talking underwater, if that good. The 8825 rocks, in this respect. As I'm using this for a home office, with no family to worry about, I have not used or tried the transfer/join features. And like other reviewers, I'm a bit peeved about Siemens putting the volume up/down control in reverse order from most American systems. But I guess that's cuz I'm American, and it's made in Germany. It may make sense over there. This is a minor issue tho, cuz once I set it, I've not used it since. The voice caller ID function is gimmicky, but entertaining for company. It might be practical if the caller ID was out of sight, but 99% of the time, it's close enough to pick up the remote or glance at the base unit LCD. The range is adequate for my 1 acre spread, and has no problems going thru the steel walls of my garage/workshop out back. It also doesn't "click click click" and conflict with my 802.11b rig like the 2420 did. In fact, the remote is crystal clear. Overall a great value. I wish they made mailboxes 3 and 4 'ring' programmable (both are for distinctive ring, but I'd like to set up a 6 ring limit before pickup). I can only find how to program line 1 and 2 for number of rings before auto answer, which is a hassle if I switch to toll saver mode, because the fax sometimes doesn't pick up on the first ring like it's supposed to. It does have an pseudo autoattendant function, but it pretty much limited to a general greeting with "to leave a message for frank, press 1, to leave a message for sue, press 2, etc., It does not offer call forwarding, or pager functions. Cheaper than the Panasonic 4000/2000's (also a great system that I use at another office), with all the features I need and probably the best audio quality I've ever heard, I think it's the best value in the 2-liners corded/cordless, that I've tried (there aren't many out there either).
Rating:
Summary: Great System, but a couple of fatal flaws
Review: Great system but for a couple of fatal flaws. For some inexplicable reason, the handsets lack a MUTE function, making them virtually useless for participating in conference calls. Also, despite having a speakerphone in the handset, the system does not have the ability to page through the handsets. Since the hardware clearly supports it, it would be nice if Siemens gave the capability to hands-free intercom a handset. The exclusion of a mute feature is unforgiven.
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