Initial Reaction To The Snom M3s
After two days of using these little phones around the house and office I’m feeling pretty good about them. They’re very small, which is potentially less than ideal, but so far it hasn’t been a problem. The batteries are Lithium-Ion and the talk time seems very good.
I used one with an old Panasonic headset for a series of conference calls today. I probably spent four hours on the line. The call quality was excellent. Volume on both the phone and the headset was good, which had been a problem on wifi phones I had tried previously.
The speaker phone feature seems a little less than ideal. Not loud enough for many situations and the mic is not that sensitive. Happily, I don’t really need it anyway.
The belt clip has a thoughtful shape that really clips hard onto a belt or pocket and won’t come off accidentally if you bend over.
Thus far I’ve been making & taking calls using Junction Networks OnSIP hosted PBX. I’ll eventually have them working with my Asterisk server as well. They support 8 separate registrations that can be mapped to one or multiple handsets.
The phones are very intuitive, mostly behaving as you’d expect a common cell phone. Intercom between the handsets is easy enough.
The manual is good but basic. More detailed documentation is to be provided by way of a wiki but that has yet to be undertaken.
I’m traveling to England for a week starting Saturday. My wife will be using one of the M3s to reach me while I’m away.
More later, including pictures, shots of menus, etc. Expect a detailed review in about three weeks.
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I’m using a few of these in my office – along with around 100 SNOM 300 IP phones.
They are great – but their software is not as comprehensive as the standard SNOM phones. But this may be addressed in software upgrades I guess.
The main limitations (compared to standard SNOM phones) are:
1. You can’t access the contact list via phone’s web server – so you can’t just upload the office contact list.
2. There does not seem to be any way to divert calls on no answer, busy etc. They just go to voice mail. But you can set a divert override via your VoIP provider if they have one – in my case http://www.voipfone.co.uk; and they do.
3. You can’t dial out from the phone via it’s web server, you must use the phone.
If any of these are an issue, the the solution is simply to NOT have the M3 replace your desk phone; rather just make it an extension. But this may not solve all the issues – ie if the M3 is out of range of it’s base station, then it’s voice-mail will answer the call before the divert on the desk phone engages.
Not being able to provision the contact list is a bit of a drag, but they tell me it will be possible in a future release of firmware.
The other two points you make don’t impact me as I’d already decided that I wasn’t replacing my desk phone (a Polycom IP600) completely.
Thus far I’ve been able to program around these behaviours using either Asterisk dialplan or OnSIP (a hosted pbx) logic. We’re happy with the M3s thus far.