Good points Superb design and outstanding battery life.

Bad points Unable to name handsets. Only 5 acceptable ringtones out of 20.

Other thoughts

I ordered this model after reading reviews of its predecessor, the 8325. The service from liGo was good and helpful advice was willingly offered over the phone. I ordered on Thursday and delivery was effected on the following Monday.

I needed to replace a Binatone system with a poor range and on which two of four handset keypads had ceased to function properly, prematurely in my view. Four of the Panasonic handsets arrived as a set already registered with the base unit and the fifth was an extra that needed registering. That's what I expected and it was no trouble to register the fifth unit although, because it didn't respond exactly as Panasonic's instructions said it would, it took more than one attempt and the application of a bit of commonsense. When it tells you to wait for one minute, don't! Setting the date/time was simple and I found the other basic operations to be intuitive. Unlike the Binatone, the Panasonic works well throughout the house.

In my view 15 of the 20 ringtones are terrible. Of the others one is fine (rather like an old American bell ring) and four are bearable tones which do sound like a phone rather than Little Johnny doing his music practice on a very cheap keyboard. The volume is perfectly adequate. Inputting the phone book entries is as tedious as you would expect but they can be copied from the first handset to all the others. You can, of course, have a different phone book for each handset, entirely different or created by deleting from/adding to the original. Intercom calls can be made between handsets and whilst the sets are numbered they can't be named. This means you can't call 'kitchen' and you have to remember which number handset is in which room. This was a complaint levelled against the 8320 series which could have been addressed, along with the poor ringtones, but no.

Calls are made and received exactly as you would expect and you can set each handset to Autotalk so that incoming calls are connected as soon as the unit is lifted from the charger without having to press the green button. The quality and volume levels are very adequate so far as I am concerned. If you don't want to be overheard when someone else picks up another handset, remember to set the privacy mode to 'on'. By default it was 'off' on my system. The answerphone offers a pre-recorded message (English-sounding female voice) or you can record your own. I like the pre-recorded message. The answering system can be set and messages can be accessed from the base station or any handset.

I haven't tried any of the other features and probably never will. So my final comment is on battery life. The instructions say that it is normal for batteries not to reach their full capacity at the initial charge (about 7 hours). So after charging them up for the first time I have left all handsets off their chargers to drain the batteries for a complete recharge. So far they have been like that for 22 days, with normal use, and the batteries still have not run out. That's more than twice what Panasonic say - outstanding is the only word for it.

I am more than happy with my purchase and just hope I will not be let down by the poor durability I have suffered with other makes. My experience with other Panasonic products has been good so I am expecting a long relationship with my new phones.

Good points Wall mountable. Clear display. Can pick up answermachne messages from any phone. Clear display.

Bad points No SIM reader for data transfer from mobiles.
Limited number of wallpaper back grounds

Other thoughts

Overall very good value