I got sent one of these phones as a waste-of-money attempt to fault-find why caller-ID for incoming calls wasn't showing up on my phone. The short answer is that the NBN NTD was broken, but they refused to believe me and their own technician who came and checked it, and wanted me to try out yet another phone (I'd already tried two base stations and 8 handsets, and their technician used the buttphone that all linesman use to diagnose faults on lines). So I figured I may as well give my assessment of it, a phone I neither need nor want.
The short answer is yuck. The audio quality is as bad as all cordless phones I've tried (destroyed by crude audio and data compression, giving all sound an annoying crunchy quality to it). Bad sound quality does nothing to help anyone with hearing difficulties. The phone is far too convoluted for non-technical people to use (too many buttons, and too many menus). And uses one of those blue backlit LCD displays that's hard to focus on if you have any kind of eyesight problem.
Yes, you can use it as a basic phone, ignoring the extra features that are difficult and annoying to access. But should a non-technical person accidentally activate any of those features, they're going to get lost trying to un-munge their phone. My mother barely managed to use the old dial-phone and push-button phones properly, she'd never manage this one.
What are some features of it?
Well, there's the virtually mandatory speakerphone feature, letting you put the phone down and use both hands to do something (like write notes, or deal with the push 1 for this, press 2 for that, “your call isn't important to us” robot menus) in the middle of a phone call.
There's a do-not-disturb feature that lets you silence the ringer, then unsilence it later on. Useful, but I bet it's not programmed smartly enough to not silence incoming calls from the emergency services. My mobile phone has been programmed with an intelligent feature that switches off your do-not-disturb feature if you'd recently called the emergency services. Allowing them to call you back if need be (I found about that after calling 000 when a extremely violent assault happened in a house on my street, and they called back while the emergency services were on their way for more information).
On the other hand, if you're phoning for help in the middle of a siege, perhaps you'd like your phone to stay silent completely under your command, without having to turn the phone fully off. If you live in a country where that happens a lot, or live with someone you really should runaway from, you might want to pre-load a silent ringtone into your phone, so you're ready to switch over to it during an emergency.
Related to the do-not-disturb function is a block call feature, supposedly designed to handle nuisance calls. The trouble is, there's no way that I can see to just hit one button and add the current call to a block list. You have to wade through menus to add numbers to it.
Of course that kind of feature is nearly useless with the current trend of every nuisance call coming from a different faked number. It has some features that suggest they might be useful for some nuisance calls; you can separately ignore calls from anonymous numbers, payphones, private numbers, and unavailable numbers. However, should you be in a situation where the phone isn't being sent any caller-ID info (like I currently am in), it doesn't block the call. It needs some data from caller-ID to do so, it needs the caller-ID to say unknown, or unavailable, etc.
It does appear to have the feature that some people would really need, to block all incoming calls except ones on a white list. But the manual gives you no information about doing this, you have to explore the phone and try things out to find it. You can switch on an “allow VIP” feature in the block list, and give certain numbers in your contact list a VIP status. That allows calls from those numbers to get through the block. That could have been done better, the manual could have explained that, and there could have been an option to simply allow calls from all numbers in your contact list.
I'm a bit suspicious that it also might have a failure that I've noticed with other phones: Some incoming calls show the full number, including country codes, others just show the person's number. Some phones don't consider them the same, and you'd have to list a person in your contact list under each number.
I think it's time caller-ID was improved so that it transmitted the calling party's name as well as number. You wouldn't have to program all your friend's numbers into your phone if you could see their name flash up on an incoming call, automatically. Also, caller-ID data should to be set by the phone company and not the account holder. That way you couldn't have nuisance call centres pretending to be someone else.
As soon as I'd finished using this phone as Telstra demanded, it has become another bit of electronic waste. The only useful thing in it was the rechargable AAA batteries, which I took out and used in something else.