The Life and Times of Seattle's Small Business Systems Consultant. Articles and advice on small business phone systems, phone and internet services, VoIP, and all things technology related.

Selkowitz Technology | Seattle's small business network and telecom consultant

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Yealink is a Chinese IP phone manufacturer, fairly new to US shores. Typically I don’t like to be the first to jump on a new manufacturer, but given some good buzz I decided to grab a T26p and take it for a spin with Cbeyond’s Cloud PBX running FreePBX.

One cannot help but figure Cisco’s IP phones inspired Yealink’s designers, by appearance only one would expect it to cost far more than it does. Its certainly a far cry from the ugliness of a Grandstream or the perhaps too space age design of the Aastra 6700 series.

Build quality was a disappointing – the bezel around the screen wasn’t seated properly, nor was the indicator on the top right. The handset shape is so-so and has a bit of flex if squeezed.

I was surprised by the lack of wall mount option, the handset itself lacks the lock to stay in place if upright, so don’t expect an accessory for this anytime soon.

My system came with firmware 6.60.0.100, I was pleasantly surprised by the excellent web interface. The system had plenty of inline support and I had the phone configured to my Asterisk server within minutes. Probably the most pleasant surprise was the lack of reboots for changes – Polycom could learn a lot from Yealink here.

One of the great appeals of the T26p is the 10 programmable feature keys (PFKs) – plus the option to add sidecars. BLFs were easy to setup, but leads to a huge gripe – the button labels. The buttons themselves are in the strip, leaving little room for writing in and making professional printed labels the domain of annoying DESI strips. This terrible design makes me long for an Aastra or Allworx.

Of course people use phones to make calls, sound quality on the handset was good, speakerphone was okay. That’s all you can say about it. Certainly no worse than anything else in the price range.

Certainly I have a few gripes about the product, but kept in context of the price, its a decent package. If they work on quality control, Yealink could become a serious contender in the IP phone business.

Leave a Reply