Personally, I'm happy with it!

After scanning some other reviews of this phone, I get the impression that there's some love, some hate and a lot of in-between on this phone system from AT&T. I think we're in the former category (love), and the only thing I can chalk up some of the more curmudgeonly comments to is perhaps that there are still a lot of people out there looking for a perfect cordless telephone system in what is CLEARLY a market that specializes in producing highly IMperfect products. One manufacturer has features A, B and C; another does D & E, another has X and Y, and YOU want to know why one manufacturer can't give you ALL of the above in ONE phone!!!

Maybe one day it'll happen, but until then the EP5632 strikes me as one of the better offerings on the market-- and this comes from someone who has a LOT of need for a good system, spend ENDLESS hours of my life researching all of the major brands (by the end of it all, I felt older, and as if I was ready for a mid-life crisis at the extinguished days of cordless phone research! grin) and who has made NUMEROUS mistakes in the past 10 years buying cordless systems that seemed pretty good out of the box, only to find that 4 months down the road... along come the problems no one told me about.

We've had our EP5632 system for just over a year now, and it still works as well as it did the day we broke it out of the box. We have the base unit plus three additional handsets (they're very easy to install and are comparatively inexpensive at most major electronics retailers) hooked up to a VoIP telephone line. I was originally seduced by all of the latest DECT-this and ultra-poop-that of some other phones, but ultimately I just kinda asked myself if it would make that much difference. We have a DECT phone from another manufacturer hooked up to our 2nd VoIP line, and it works reasonably well but not anything close to the AT&T phone (it's also more confusing and cumbersome to operate). Which leads me to the first great strength of THESE phones-- the controls are laid out logically, are easy to find and are generally goof-proof. The second great strength is that the color menus (you can customize them with your own pics, but we found no need to do so with ours), which I originally thought were merely a bit of marketing fluff to make them prettier (which they are), actually turned out to be helpful in terms of visibility and utility.

Third great strength-- they're reasonably solid. Ours have fallen and/or been accidentally tossed about the room repeatedly over time, and there are still no signs that a button is going bad or the unit chassis of any of the handsets has taken any permanent damage.

Next-- sound quality and range. The "clarity thing" is the biggest marketing gimmick in modern cordless phonedom, but in all honesty, even though these are "merely" normal 5.8 Ghz phones without any additional fancy stuff (e.g. DECT), the sound quality is regularly superior to most other cordless phones I've owned or used, and this is true even when I'm out in the back yard, a minimum of 30-50 feet from the house itself, and maybe an additional 20 feet from the handset cradle and an additional 20 feet beyond that (straight-line distance) to the base unit upstairs (because it's used on a VoIP line, we have to have the base plugged in to our router/broadband modem).

Finally, cost-- the EP5632 is, I suppose, competitively priced with many other "normal" systems out there, and I suppose someone somewhere knows of a system that has double the range, three times the clarity, etc.... but I wonder, given my price-conscious research from immediately before I bought this system, exactly how much THEY were willing to pay for such a system. Whatever it was, we didn't need anything nearly as fancy. I just wanted a reliable system with good-quality handsets that was easy to use at a decent price.

The EP5632 has met or exceeded all of those expectations, and I have been quietly impressed with the system since that time-- in fact, I never really thought about how much i like these phones until I came across "cordless phone" reviews in epinions and I thought it was a good subject to which to post a new review! My retiree parents are currently suffering the indignities of a short-range, can't-hold-a-charge battery system in their own home, and I have every intention of getting them one of the AT&T systems for Christmas this year.

On the down side, as has been noted in other reviews, it WOULD have been nice if AT&T had thought about a common directory system in which a number pre-programmed into the base unit got distributed to ALL of the handsets (oops). That requires a little extra work if you're a directory-dial aficianado. In a PERFECT cordless phone world, they also could have made these things wireless network ready; I'd love to be able to put the base wherever I please and connect it to a wireless server or something like that so it could take advantage of my home network to get back to the VoIP hub. But I think I'm relatively realistic with my expectations for cordless phones, and that's one of the reasons I think I would rate this system one of the best and most cost-effective in the REAL cordless world for now. Not the cheapest OR the fanciest on the market, but a wonderful equilibrium of features and quality for price in my book.

The Bluetooth connection to our cell phones has worked flawlessly from day one, by the way, and was very easy to set up. That was one of the selling points of this unit that I fully expected to wind up being an illusory promise-- but so far I have been pleasantly proven wrong with respect to how well it actually works. Don't really use it all that much these days with reliable VoIP service, but it does come in handy from time to time. Read the manual with reasonable care, and you should be able to get these results too-- setting it up properly ONCE should (at least in my experience) preclude Bluetooth-cell-connection disaster down the road. The caller ID and answering system features work well, and I like how they've integrated the two systems on the color menu-- you can see who called, and if they left a message, push ONE button from the CID display and you go directly into the actual voice message. The on-board answering system works fine; we have also had no problem with the phones recognizing our VoIP providers' own voice mail messaging system when someone's been dumped in THERE to leave a message.

For my money, the EP5632 is a winner and we're happy with the purchase. My only parting advice is to do the research before you buy to make sure that it-- or ANY cordless system for that matter-- has the right combination of features and value for your needs, given all of the different combinations of systems on the market these days. If the EP5632 fits your needs, my experience is that you should be at least content (if not very happy, as we are!) with the purchase.