Philips VOIP1511B/37 Skype Travel Phone
by Philips
|
List Price: Our Price: $14.99 You Save: $11.00 (42%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Philips VOIP1511B/37 Skype Travel Phone
Customer Review: No Skype 4.0 drivers
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this little Skype handset in December for a trip to India and was very pleased with it. Although a cheap headset would have worked just as well, I liked the idea of a handset that could be passed easily passed around and used by fellow travelers who could just use the keypad on the handset to dial instead of entering numbers on my netbook keyboard.
The phone is small, well-designed, sturdy and sounds as good as any headset I've used.
However, I was very disappointed when the latest release of Skype came out (NOT a beta!) and all of the handset functions were incompatible. There are no updated drivers on the Philips website, yet they've updated the product leaflet (as of 3/08/2009) describing it as "Skype Certified" and "Fully compatible with Skype."
I'm rolling back to an earlier version of Skype and expect it to work just fine. However, the joint failure of Skype and Philips to come out with drivers in a timely manner has taken my opinion down from four stars to two.
UPDATE 7/31/2009: Philips has been sporadically updating the drivers, but they lag behind Skype and there have been a couple of driver updates since my original post. Most recently, in late July 2009, I submitted a somewhat angry comment via the Philips support website and was pleased to receive an email indicating that new drivers had been uploaded to the site as a result.
Customer Review: Not so Good
Summary: 2 Stars
This skype phone has been a pain from day one to keep working. The driver crashes frequintly on both of my laptops. One laptop has XP Home and the other is running Vista Basic. The problems I've had with it are different from the XP Home computer and the Vista one. This phone does not work with the most recent versions of Skype. I had to un-install Skype 4.1 and go back to version 3.8, which Phillips provide on the disk. Even though I downloaded a 175 mb update and rolled my Skype back, it is just as bad. On my Vista computer, the driver crashes when you try to use the buttons on the phone. On my XP computer, the driver will not start with windows, when I manually start the driver, it works fine for hours, but at some point I will realize that it is not running. The sound quality is really good on the XP laptop, not so much on the Vista machine. My laptop with Vista is brand new, this phone was one of the first things I set up, so the machine is not all messed up and my other XP machine has been used alot, software installed and un-installed ect.Customer Review: Skype Travel Phone
Summary: 2 Stars
I was chagrined to discover after installation of the software accompanying this phone that it is not compatible with the current version of Skype, that no upgrade is available from Philips, and that Skype does not allow me to retrofit with the older version that was compatible with this phone. On the other hand, notwithstanding the annoying repetition of the incompatibility announcement, it seems to work OK. In general, I've found Skype overrated for travel use, especially where bandwith must be shared.Customer Review: USB phone with limited useage
Summary: 2 Stars
This Philips USB phone would rate an "A" for use with "Skype" if its drivers permitted using the latest version of "Skype". Current drivers are limited to "Skype" versions under 3.8. Latest "Skype" version is 4.--
In addition "Secunia Personal Inspector" considers this "Skype" version to be insecure.
Customer Review: Waste of $$
Summary: 2 Stars
This Skype phone looks great but that's where it ends. First, it does NOT have a Mac app yet. Even our IT guy had problems getting it installed on the PC side of my MacBook.