How to Buy a Cordless Phone

Video Transcript

"Hi. Today, in the world of technology and pagers and PDAs, cordless phones still have a role to play. If you want to use a...have a large space and you want to be able to communicate, say, outside to make phone calls -- you want to watch your minutes, you want to control what you set and what you're spending in terms of your phone dollars, I suggest think about a cordless phone. The main thing to think about is distance. Will it...will it go as far as you want it to go because the phone communicates from the phone to the base, and that's how it happens. In England, where I lived for a couple of years, our cottage was 300 years old and our wall was three feet thick. The base was inside, the phone was outside. I wanted to make a phone call from the garden. It wouldn't communicate to one another, so that was a problem. So that's one area you've got to look at. Will it communicate? Will it happen? Will it work effectively? Charging is another thing that you want to think about. A phone like this where the phone is up straight, you put it down, it can fall off, it loses its charge. You won't get any use out of your phone. A good one is one that goes flat into the base. It charges really, really easily. We have two at home, and we prefer the one that goes flat. The charge tends to last about an hour. In terms of frequency, right now, the latest and greatest frequency is a 46 gigahertz, I believe, it is. And that gives you very good quality, clear, no interference, and distance is pretty strong. The next...previous one to that, still pretty good, is 902 megahertz. And that, again, shouldn't be too crowded. Anything older than that, you're going to have a lot of crowding, interference, pretty poor quality on your phone. The one word of caution I'd like to give you is if you live in an area that may have storms -- like in Florida, we have our hurricanes -- the power goes out, you need to have a good, old-fashioned phone that has a landline, no electricity, and you'll be able to have telephone connections...power. Cell phones also do that -- serve that purpose as well. So happy shopping for you cordless phone. Kathy Pabst Robshaw, Telephone Effectiveness."