I'm afraid you are going to get a whole lot of subjective opinions and bait here ... but here goes.
I like the DSS keys on the Aastra 9133i (real LED's for busy lamp fields) but the firmware has some oddities & won't properly do directed call pickup. I'm OK with the Aastra 480i but it needs real LED's next to the display instead of just the icon which is monochrome and doesn't stand out plus the directed call pickup problem. I hate the feel of the buttons on the newer 5X series Aastra's but they have more stable firmware, better features and directed call pickup works. None of the Aastras let you know which line has VM in a multi-line environment. I love the sound quality of the Cisco's. I love the envelope icon _per_line_ so we can tell which line has a VM in a multi-line environment. I hate the lack of DSS keys on Cisco's, they cost way too much, and (at least on my older firmware) can't do push to the display. The polycom's sound great but have a horrible web user interface and they appear to default to FTP config meaning you have to "touch" each one just to deploy if you are using TFTP. The SNOM's work very well technically but have a very European flavour to their interface/operation that I'm just not at ease with (yet) but they look promising once I overcome the cultural differences. (Next obvious point is will our customers overcome the cultural differences in user interface to make them acceptable?) Ultimately, the customer chooses for us. We sell more Aastra. Personally, it does less and costs way too much but I still have a 7960 on my desk. - dbc. From: Matthew Mackes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: December-08-07 9:06 PM Cc: [email protected] Subject: [on-asterisk] What phone is the best? Cisco? Polycom? What phone is the best? I'm sure this question has been asked in the past, but I would love to see what you all think. My Corp currently has around 250 Aastra 480i deployed, and we have another 200 extensions that are waiting transition to Asterisk. We like the 480i, however they are in a harsh retail environment that covers Convenient Stores, Delis, Car Wash Offices and Bays, Car Detail Shops, and Oil Lube Bays. They have fared just "OK" Cisco has approached us to deploy 7941G's with SIP at a decent price, and for 30 dollars extra per phone, they will replace them"no matter what", for three years. The Catch is that they don't support Asterisk directly on the 7941G, so, if I have any questions, they wont help. This is not to say they wont sell them to us, knowing full well we want them for use with Asterisk, however they just don't support the 79X1G series on anything but the new SIP Cisco Call Manager just yet. However, Cisco DOES now FULLY support the 7940G on SIP with Asterisk- Yep, thats right.... and that is directly from Cisco TAC. However.... the catch is, as far as I can tell the 7940G is not POE compliant!!!! So, its a rock and a hard place with Cisco. I like Cisco phones, and hate the call manager. Which brings me to my question- What do you all use? I have heard good things about Polycom, and I like the few test units we have, however the XML configs and SIP upgrade/ provisioning is a bear, and I have heard that parts of Polycom's SIP Stack is unhappy with some of the things Asterisk does with SIP, causing lockups. Thoughts? Matt
