This year we’ve seen the emergence of Siemens and Panasonic as clearly the best brands for cordless phones. But with an abundance of choice, we wanted to bring you the best of the best. We tested each phone for best sound, durability, styling, features and much more.

Here they are, the best cordless phones to have graced us in 2008.

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Best Brand: Siemens

A great year for the german company, Siemens have produced a fantastic range of home cordless phones, namely the Gigaset range. With 2 years guarantee on everything and top notch quality, you almost feel sorry for the other brands. Panasonic are hot on their heels though.

Highly commended: Panasonic
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Best all round phone: Siemens Gigaset E455

No surprises that it’s a Siemens phone that wins this one. A great cordless phone packed with lots of nice features and great build/sound quality. This under rated home phone was top of the pile in our list of top 10 best cordless phones of 2009. More details here.

Highly commended: Siemens Gigaset SL565

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Best looking / stylish phone: Siemens Gigaset SL 565

The slick and super sexy Siemens SL565 received virtually all the votes in our most desirable home phone poll. With its understated iphone ‘esc feel, it’s clean lines and shiny surface, it resembles a mobile phone rather than your typical boring home phone.  With its solid polished cradle, this beautiful handset will sit proudly in any living room.

Highly commended: Jacob Jensen T80

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Best sound quality phone: Panasonic KX TG 8322

Very tough one but this top selling phone from Panasonic (their latest model), just pipped the chasing pack. Siemens also boast an excellent sound quality especially with their new HSD technology. It was a difficult decision but we felt the Panasonic had a slightly punchier sound on the speakerphone. Make no mistake though, there’s little to choose between Siemens and Panasonic on this.

Highly commended: Siemens Gigaset range of house phones

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Best for range: Panasonic KX TG 8222 Long range phone

There were a handful of contenders for the top honour here. Again, it was Panasonic and Siemens leading the way with their long range phones. The Panasonic varients are cheaper and you can certainly have more boosters for your money. If you want to spend that bit more, then you’ll probably get a better all round package with Siemens. The Panasonic KX TG 8222 long range phone is a great package with nearly twice as much range as most other phones.

Highly commended: Panasonic KX TG 8321 long range cordless

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Best for features: Siemens Gigaset SL 565

The SL565 has come up trumps again. Cram packed with more features than a James Bond gadget, this takes home phones to a new level. Some of its features include: bluetooth, vCards, large name and number directory, appointments alerts, vibration alert when on silent mode, syncronisation with outlook, voice activated dialling, voice announced caller ID, call conferencing and much much more. Just dont push the button at the top or it will fire deadly darts at your visitors.

Highly commended: Siemens Gigaset SL 375

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Best for business: Panasonic KX TG 7341

The successor to the Panasonic KT CD 240, this is ideal for any home or office. With its unique dialpad on the base unit and it’s many no nonsense features, can you afford to be without out it in your home office. Given the current economical climate, it’s also a bit of a bargain. Who said making business decisions was hard.

Highly commended: Siemens Gigaset S685

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Best for the family: Siemens Gigaset C475

This little gem is perfect for any family. With its lovely colour screen, choice of ring tones, SMS feature, screensavers, room monitor, keypad lock, handset naming, name and number directory and more. This excellent phone has great sound quality and will no doubt be a sure fire hit with any family. And probably one of the few bargains from Siemens.

Highly commended: Panasonic KX TG 8323

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Best accessory: Jabra GN 9120 DG wireless headset

With 12 hours talk time, superb sound quality and up to 100metres of range, the 9120 DG is the perfect companion to any home cordless phone. No need to take the handset with you. Receiving calls on the headset is a doddle and you can be completely handsfree as you walk and talk (or just relax) using this fully wireless headset. To make calls, you still have to use the handse to make the call and then transfer it to the headset. At over £100, its not cheap. Is it worth it? If you make or receive a lot of calls, it will be a life saver. You can get it a bit cheap with several product bundles which include this headset.

Highly commended: Siemens Gigaset M34 USB dongle

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Best new technology: Bluetooth

It’s widely available with most mobile phones and PC’s. But now,  you can enjoy this technology in some of the newer home cordless phones. Siemens is as ever the leader here and has incorporated this feature in its Gigaset phones namely the SL565, SL375 and S685 phones. So you can pair up a bluetooth headset for handsfree talking or even use it download data from your PC (or mobile) onto your home phone - nifty.

Highly commended: SIM card readers (Siemens E455 and several BT phones - yes we were surprised too)

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Best ECO environmentally friendly phone: Siemens Gigaset E455

Siemens have done it again with a staggering 6th award. Surely they can’t have another year like this. The brilliant and clever E455 can at best reduce power consumption by just over 60%. Now if only every household had one of these, just imagine how much energy we would save each year. Have we said what a great phone this is?

Highly commended: Panasonic KX TG 8322

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Best for hearing (hearing problems): Panasonic KX-TG 7180

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For those with hearing problems, there’s little to choose from out there. it seems to be an area widely neglected. And the phone that are available, always don’t seem to not cut the mustard and struggle with volume/calrity. But 2008 saw the launch of a world first, bone conduction phone. How do these work we hear you ask. Well, quite simply when you put the handset next to your ear, it sends omits vibrations (which cannot be fealt so it feels like a normal conversation). These vibrations are then translated into sounds by your ear. This ingenious device means you will always hear the caller perfectly irrespective of any hearing issues. Genius. Add to that its bigger buttons, easy to read screen, build in answer phone, ease of use and you wonder why this phone isn’t the biggest selling thing this year. Maybe it needs a bit more attention. It’s not cheap, but mostly important, it really works! Our advice, don’t waste money on anything else unless its well out of your budget. You can purchase one here.

Highly commended: Siemens Gigaset E365

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There you have it - the best of the best for 2008. Do you have a particular favourite you’d liked to have seen mentioned. We’d love to hear from you.