Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips ID9374B/05 XD Sound Cordless Phone - Quad Pack With Answer Machine

They look great. (If dont care for this, buy another product!)
Sound quality is good.
Range is great.
Functionally lacking and flawed however....

They have all the usual features expected on this type of phone, but somehow you'd just expect a few more ringtones and backgrounds on offer - that kinda thing.

The flawed functionaility is however the only reason I have to knock stars off - and 3 is being generous considering....

For starters, I have 4 phones, in 4 rooms - if i miss a call, then the the handset displays new missed call and who it was - obviously. However, if I clear that missed call, it clears it ONLY on THAT handset - all the others still show new missed call - STUPID and VERY VERY ANNOYING. Thus I can never be sure if a new missed call really is, or maybe my other half cleared it on another handset... you see my point. Strangly, if they leave a message, there is no new call and the new message icon shows, but this DOES clear from all phones once listened to.

Secondly, caller ID works ok, BUT... you will need to make sure numbers match EXACTLY what comes up when someone phones. Sounds no big deal - however, if you've just copied across your numbers from a mobile SIM card you'll soon discover that you will need to remove all area codes for numbers in the same area as you - as, unlike any previous phones, its not clever enough to work out 01234 567890 is the same as 567890. Most annoyingly however is foreign numbers, Australia in my case, the number displayed by caller ID is not a number you can dial back with - you need the country code, thus it doesn't match the address book unless you have two entries for the same number but with the lsightly different format numbers. Very annoying!

One more.... copying address book entries. I dont know about you, but I for one bought these phones so I could have more around the house - not for different people or anything like that, so I dont need multiple address books. My old phone had a shared address book and then individual ones for each handset - even that was a bit annoying to setup, but this doesn't have a shared address book and its very annoying to setup. Its ok, if, when you first set it up you put in ALL your numbers (making note of the above issue!) in one phone and then copy all to all the other handsets - that works 'ok'. BUT, should you want to change a number - you have to visit each phone. You CANNOT copy a single number from one phone to another - but you can go through saying yes or no to each entry. That would be 'ok', if it weren't for the genius decision to ask for confirmation to change existing entries on the REMOTE handset! So you basically need all handsets to hand when doing this, and its often far quicker to just manually change on each.

I wont mention the SMS and SMS boxes because I dont really use it so didn't spend much time on it, but suffice to say that didn't seem to work as I'd thought either!

So, for functionaility it's very annoying - but once setup, the only ongoing annoyance is the new missed call display not clearing. And then you have some very stylish looking phones, which is what i bought them for. Suggest that would be the only reason anyone would buy these phones for however - and thats why i stuck at 3 stars. If Philips just spent 5 more minutes and a bit of common sense on the functionailiy they would have been 5 stars.

Hope this helps you decide!

I was given a twin set of ID937s and thought they were so good I'd like one in every room of the house. So I bought the quadruple set as well.

I'm hearing impaired, so the HD sound option is ideal for me.

Setting up the second base station caused all sorts of problems. For a start, somehow I ended up with handsets with duplicate identities. Once I realised this I was able to deregister one of the duplicates from each base, but it took me a couple of weeks to work out what was going on. When the problem arose, the handsets gave no indication of the reason. The duplicate showed a "flat battery" signal. The instructions were very vague, and of course this is the one part of the set-up which is essential, but significantly different from setting up a mobile phone.

Now I have an excellent home phone system!

Two little niggles:
The screen of each unit glows dimly, sufficient to keep a light sleeper awake.
If you have received a phone call (even if answered), the red indicator light keeps flashing until you check it on the "Call List" - surely unnecessary. It's a nuisance switching this off on all the handsets, so eventually the house if full of blinking handsets - literally!

I very much agree with the previous reviewer about the annoyances caused by the poorly-designed software that comes with the phone. If you update the base phone, you have to clear and update the phone books of the slave phones one-by-one. Also, I can't sort out how to update the base phone's phone book with more than one SIM card. Call sharing is available (that is, everyone can connect to a call simply by lifting the handset--a nice feature if the call is for someone upstairs) but this isn't outlined in the manual. On the plus side, the hardware design is very good and unobtrusive, both the sound quality and range are truly excellent, and battery life is not a concern at all. One hopes that Philips will offer a software upgrade to rid the phone of its annoyances.

I am not sure what I expected, and perhaps my expectations have been affected by some of the great mobiles I have had, but I have been really disappointed. These units are uncomfortable to hold. The user interface is brutal and things like the caller display are buried under 2 key strokes that are not intuitive. Also had problems with one of the units charging. It 'crashes' and needs the batteries removing. The standby time appears to be much less than previous phones I have had. There is a clock feature on the phone when it is in the stand, which would be great if it did not emit so much light on the bedside table! The function to copy numbers from my sim card worked really well, but I now have a about 100 numbers on the phone. To find a number you have to scroll through each name pressing the button every time! No shortcuts either - unless you can be bothered to set up the hot keys which are limited in number. I usually look the number up on my mobile. It is quicker than looking through the list, or the caller list. Another word of warning, we bought a new TV about 18 months ago, and have had it replaced once, 'fixed' 3 times and had the local Arial people crawling all over the house because we could not get a stable digital signal. Turns out it was the based station to the phone. It is now at the other end of the house. Since moving it we do not hear it ring! All in all this is a purchase I regret!