Home > Consumer Reviews > GE 29992 Digital Messaging System with Caller ID

In addition to my personal calls, I am the after hours contact for software support for a large (700+) office. I carry a cell phone to provide this support, but have the calls roll over to my home phone whenever I'm in a position where I can't pick them up. Since all of the calls from the office go through a trunk line, I'm able to have those calls answered with a different message than my family messages, and the school that keeps calling to tell me that some kid I've never heard of didn't bring his lunch money can get their own special message too. I bought it because it was cheap, but I've been more than pleased with what I got for the money.

I've been extremely disappointed with this answering machine, for two main reasons. First, there is no way to retrieve an erased message. This is especially a problem because the system doesn't really pause after messages as you're playing them back. So after listening to a message you can't hit erase, or you will end up erasing the next (unheard) message. This has happened to me on more than one occasion. Second, the unit often clicks loudly when you pick up the phone, presumably because it's trying to get the caller ID. It's extremely annoying and also has interfered with dial-up connections I was trying to make on more than one occasion. Bottom line, I'd suggest you shop around for something built with real consumers in mind.

As an answering device, this machine offers a lot of features
for an amazingly low price. The sound quality is good, it's
easy to use, and I especially like the informative lighted LCD
display.

I was hoping from the product description that this machine would
offer protection from solicitors, but that feature turned out to
be useless. The blocked-call feature literally handles only
calls identified as "blocked"; it's unable to handle or identify
(with its audible signal) calls identified as "anonymous" or
"unknown", which covers most solicitation calls. You cannot do
any other special call handling, such as a specific greeting,
with unknown calls.

This product is almost what I wanted. I hope they fix the
blocked-call "feature" in the next version. As an answering
machine, it's still better than any others I've tried.

I bought this product over three months ago and I am returning to buy another for my mother. I am very impressed by the quality and great features of this product.

Two features made me buy this product. The first is that messages are saved in memory chips not on tape. On tape if you have consecutive messages they are difficult to delete without having to listen to the whole message. The second reason I bought this answering machine is that my area is subject to power outages and all voice recordings are saved in memory when the power goes out.

I read other reviews of this product on the sound quality of the recodings which almost dissuaded me from purchasing this product but I now feel they were misleading. For me, this was a significant improvement from my last answering machine and yes, the sound quality is superb.

With configurable outgoing messages based on caller ID, this machine would be real nice (although you can't configure ring/message options for anonymous callers like you can on the Casio TA-140 & 145). Unfortunately the 29992 suffers from several intermittent flaws. For example, for about 25% of the calls it doesn't record any caller ID information (on the same calls, other caller-ID boxes in the house work just fine). I bought two different 29992 units for my relatives last Christmas and both units had the same intermittent flaws. There was no information in the box on how to contact Thomson Consumer Electronics to resolve these issues, so I sent them back and I bought them the Casio TA-140 from Amazon.com instead.