DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We had a great cordless phone, made by Siemens. The base design was clean and simple, yet lacked no useful features. The handsets were sleek and high-tech and worked well. And the phonebook feature was really cool — each handset could “beam” phonebook entries to the other handset.

Then one of the handsets died. We could hear fine but nobody could hear us.

We exchanged the unit. The replacement worked for about six months and then died in the same fashion. The warranty had expired, and Siemens had discontinued the line. Repair prices were greater than the cost of full new phone systems from Costco.

So we dropped $90 on a Uniden phone system, spent a half-hour setting the thing up, spent another half-hour retyping in all the numbers from the phonebook on the Siemens, spent a half-hour lamenting the Uniden’s seriously lame design, and then discovered that the Uniden folks hadn’t figured out how to have handsets share phonebook data. They’ll sell you a 2-handset phone, but they assume you want to type in all your friends’ phone numbers twice. WTF?

The Uniden phone also rejected the headset we’d bought for the Siemens. So we bought the Uniden-brand headset, and it sucked — the sound quality was poor on both ends. I swear there are two miniature tin cans and a string somewhere inside the case. There’s a volume control; the three settings are “off,” “static,” and “not loud enough.”

14 months later, one of the handsets died — we could hear callers, but they couldn’t hear us. Of course, the dead handset was the one that stored our phone book.

I looked with fondness back at our sexy Siemens phone. Some research revealed that the Gigaset 2400 line was plagued by handset death due to inadequate shielding. I found a guy who claimed he could repair them, but before we could work out a deal he disappeared, probably taken out by Uniden’s advance marketing team.

Is this planned obsolescence? Or are the makers too focused on whizzy new features to spend any time on reliability? I’d burned through three phones in four years. We are creating a steady stream of usable answering machines without handsets, and an equally steady stream of landfill waste. Can handsets be recycled?

We reviewed a dozen phones at Hello Direct, and rejected them all. I can’t believe some of these phones can only store 10 phone numbers. I can buy a 64 megabyte USB pen drive for $15 — enough memory to store approximately 1,342,177 names and numbers, which would allow me to index all of Sonoma County, including cellphones — yet the rocket scientists at GE can’t find space for more than 10 numbers in a $50 telephone.

Wandering through Costco, we spotted a phone bundle from AT&T — $90 for a digital answering machine and four handsets. That’s twice as many handsets as we need, and I was already moving to the next aisle when my wife pointed out that this would be cheap insurance: after the first two handsets die, presumably in about 14 months, we’d still have two that work. I couldn’t knock the logic. The interface design is needlessly complex, but at least the handsets can share phonebook data: a minor victory in a battle that consumers have already lost.