Customer Reviews:
  Works well August 7, 2008
The product works fine. The volume on the phone is slightly low. Not sure if it the skype issue or handset issue.
Awesome Phone August 3, 2008
This phone is quite awesome, is sad that Linksys stop making it anymore, This little phone not just is DECT, cordlessly covers over hundreds of feet. This phone can also supports landline just in case you're not Skype ready yet, but overall one thing I dislike about this phone is there's no volume control although the sound quality is excellent. I was lucky that I got this phone for $107, although now is over $240 everywhere. So does many other Skype phones as well... So I would recommend this phone if the price is still low, but now, I would rather recommend the Phillips Skype phone...
 horrible phone August 1, 2008
This is my second phone, and it is doing the same thing my first one did. It works fine for a week, then all i get is "system is starting up" and stays that way. If i push any button, I get "unavailable". If I disconnect it from the computer for a day, it works for two days, then repeats. I can't rely on this phone, calls to linkskys are not productive. When it works it's great, but mostly when I reach for it I know it will be two days before i can use it again.
 Linksys CIT400: Good for a week, then it failed July 29, 2008
SHORT VERSION: Do not want.
LONG, EDUCATIONAL VERSION:
The Linksys CIT400 has seen a lot of mixed reviews on the 'net. Reviews from places like ArsTechnica are solid reviews.
However, the problem is that these reviews don't capture long-term, real-world usage. More specifically, they don't capture the problems that people are likely to run into.
The Skype forums and reviews found at Amazon are good resources for what real users have experienced with these devices. However, many of these reviews are old---one or more years old. But, as I've now discovered, they are 100% relevant. The reason for this is because the software running on the phone hasn't been updated for a long time... the last update was over a year ago. This means that any problems people were having a year ago are still relevant today, because the software hasn't changed.
(At least, I believe this is true to the best of my knowledge.)
However, this wasn't completely clear before I bought the phone. I hoped many of the problems I read about had been fixed---they were *old* problems, after all. So, I ordered it, plugged it in, entered account information... and we were good to go.
The phone worked great for a week. Calls were reasonably clear, SkypeOut worked a treat.
Then, it started into some loop where it was constantly trying to retrieve contact information. We rebooted it. It kept going. We reset it. It worked for just a bit, and then it started trying to retrieve contact information again.
The phone went straight back to Amazon.
The appeal of the Skype phone is that it is brain-dead simple to set up. The downside is that it is closed-source and proprietary: the only people who can fix it are the people who made it. This is bad, by-and-large. All of telephony works on *standards*. Your landline, your cell phone... these things work because the signals (be they wired or wireless) are standards that must be adhered to, or the FCC will get very, very angry (and your phone won't work).
You see, SIP phones are based on standards. Just like your browser uses HTTP (a standard) and HTML (a standard), SIP phones use the "SIP" protocol (Session Initiation Protocol) to do "voice over IP" (or "voice over Internet Protocol"). Ten years ago, SIP had a hard time with all kinds of things. Now, the technology is more mature. Certainly, it is more widely implemented (there are many, many SIP phones, and only a few Skype phones), and the technologies involved are all standardized technologies. And, in some cases, they're even freely available and open-source, meaning there is a community behind them, not just a single private company.
Although setting up a SIP-based VOIP phone is a bit more work, I've decided it is an adventure I have to take. I want my internet-based phone to work well, and the CIT400 Skype phone does not.
Last I checked, it was already several stops along its journey back to Amazon. I'm sad it didn't work, but it isn't easily fixed (if it can be fixed at all), and as many other people have found, Linksys support can't do anything for the phone owner who is having the problems I encountered.
Best for voip telephony July 28, 2008
This is a great phone for voip, the quality is great, battery lasts long, and lot of options on the menu, the porcess to create a skype account is very easy and you can save a lot of money on international calls...
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