Vtech I5871 Expandable Digital Answering Review

We have had this phone for about a year now. At first we only bought the base system (no additional handsets) but over the course of 6 months it was frequently dropping calls and showing 'searching for base' on the handset. We thought the base might be too far away (it was upstairs - my old Panasonic WiFi worked fine at that distance). Anyway, we added an extra tube below and it worked fine, you guessed it, 6 months. Again, we're back to frequent and now predictable call drops. For a while it…

I've had this exact model (I5871) of V-Tech phone for a couple of years and finally a couple of weeks ago the main handset of the device broke. (The handset display went blank - no one could see who was calling and no access to the features.) So I bought a new base station and handset and registered the satellite units to the new base. One of the units had trouble registering with the new base unit, but it registered the next morning. Everything was fine and seemed to be working fine. Let's…

Many (most!) of the complaints in these reviews are related to the endless "database not found" loop and "sudden static/dropped calls". Turns out it has to do with dead batteries. Replace the battery, charge it overnight and these problems will go away! I don't know if they were actually crappy batteries, or if it was bad charging circuitry, or if they just didn't show up as dead in the OSD. Anyway, I decided not to buy the VTech replacement (permanently "unavailable" on their website, I wonder