Since 2014, we’ve compiled and updated a spreadsheet of more than 100 phones made by the major manufacturers—Panasonic and VTech, the latter of which also makes AT&T-branded phones. It’s a seemingly endless list of confusing alphanumeric product names, only slightly differentiated feature sets, and designs with few meaningful differences. Complicating things further, many models are available only through certain retailers (Amazon, Target, Walmart, and so on).
So we asked Panasonic and VTech about their latest offerings to help determine which might be worth testing, looked at retailers’ best-seller lists, and pored over the few other professional reviews still being written about cordless phones.
We knew what to look for based on our own experience with cordless phones, surveying Wirecutter staff on what they would want in a home phone and combing through user reviews. Cordless phones have taken on some new skills since the era when they dominated the world (like answering calls with Siri), but the core criteria remain the same:
- Audio quality: A phone has one primary job, and that is to enable conversations with crisp, clear, and loud audio for both you and the person you’re on the call with. No one should have to struggle to make out what the person on the other end is saying.
- Range: One of the biggest benefits of a cordless phone is that you can use it far from its base, and the farther you can go without your call breaking up, the better. You and your phone should be able to roam around your house or apartment—and even your yard—without dropping the call.
- Ease of use: The best cordless phones make it easy to quickly get on and off the phone. That doesn’t mean just having large buttons and a high-contrast screen (though those are important), it also means having intuitive menus with as few steps as necessary to call a saved contact, redial a number, or block a number.
- Battery life: Like other cordless devices, the longer you can use these handsets away from their charging base, the better.
A few notes on call-blocking: Spam and spam calls are still a nuisance, so it’s important that phones offer an effective way to block them. Most cordless phones today have a button you can press when an unwanted call comes in, which moves that number to a block list so it won’t ring you going forward.
More advanced phones, like our top pick, have a built-in database of blocked numbers. In testing, we turned off Verizon’s spam blocking feature on the landline to see how well these features work; surprisingly, we got fewer spam calls than before we started testing, which could mean that the phones’ database was working (or Murphy’s Law was at work).
Another feature is pre-screening, which prevents robocalls from getting to you in the first place, for example, by requiring callers to press “1” before letting the phone ring. Setting up these blocking features can be confusing, however, and prevent calls you actually do want (if the person who’s trying to reach you gets confused by the screening message), so we would only use it if you’re inundated with spam calls.
In our previous round of testing, we used the same criteria to research amplified phones, with additional qualifications specific to their intended purpose:
- Hearing aid compatibility: The HLAA’s Lise Hamlin told us that the first thing someone shopping for an amplified phone should look for is hearing aid compatibility. “When somebody has a hearing aid, or a cochlear implant, or a bone anchor device,” she said, “there could be some noise on the line.”
- Volume and tone adjustment: By definition, an amplified phone must raise the volume of the speaker on the other end of the line, so we considered only phones that specifically advertised boosted volume. As for tone adjustment—the ability to alter the high and low ends of the audio to account for different levels and kinds of hearing loss—we preferred phones that offered more levels of control because they’re more likely to benefit more people. “The more control you have, the better,” Hamlin told us. “You just want to be able to push the button until it sounds right.”
- Headset or neck-loop jack, base/handset speakerphone, slow-speech mode, and visual ringing indicator: All of these features benefit the greater community of people with hearing loss, even if not every individual uses every one of them.
Retired audiologist Lisa Devlin made calls using our amplified phone options and toggled through the various settings intended to aid hearing, including the volume-adjustment options, tone control, slow-speech and noise-reduction functions, and any audio assist or boost buttons.
After our latest research, we chose to test 11 promising models. Here’s how:
- We connected them to a Verizon Fios home phone line, rotating them in batches of five at a time with a line splitter for efficiency, though not our sanity. (Imagine five phones with different ringtones going off at the same time, each answering system recording the others’ greetings. It was cordless phone inception.)
- To measure range, we placed a call from the second floor of a house to the National Weather Service’s automated hotline, which provides a recorded message with the weather conditions and forecast. We walked down the stairs, out of the house, and down the street, continuing to listen until the call started to break up.
- To evaluate outgoing voice quality, we left voicemails in which we read lists from Harvard Sentences, which are used by the telecommunications industry for standardized testing of phone systems. In addition to listening to our voice messages over and over again, two Wirecutter staffers evaluated and ranked the clips for clarity and volume.
- To evaluate incoming voice quality, we had family members call us and recite passages from books or newspaper articles while we alternated listening between phones.
- For about three weeks, we also just lived with the phones and took and made dozens of phone calls. We noted the not-often-advertised but important features that make using a cordless phone easier, like one-button speed dialing and clearly labeled buttons. We also took notes on how many days the handsets lasted before the battery life went from four bars to one.
