If SNOM’s promotional video for the 700 series is to be believed, these phones are designed for users that fall in the cross-section of business professionals and smooth jazz aficionados (http://youtu.be/nVwsQmSSFaI).
SIP Compliance:
I was able to test the SNOM 760 to certify compatibility with our services and compliance with SIP RFC. The 760 is pretty stellar on compliance and easy to setup either registering directly with Flowroute or with a SIP-compatible IP-PBX.
Usability/Functionality:
The web GUI admin interface is both easy to use and robust in the features provided. This phone supports all your common features like call forwarding and call waiting as well as some more advanced features like SIP presence advertising and LDAP integration. You can configure up to twelve different identities or extensions that the phone is registered to, this is great for me as I have multiple different test systems and accounts that I place calls through every day. One bugaboo with the 760 is that using custom ringers is a little tricky. By tricky I mean it only supports 8Khz 16 bit alaw encoded mono wav files under 250KB, and you’ve got to be sure it matches these requirements exactly, otherwise when your phone rings it sounds like an intercepted interstellar transmission. SNOM has a utility available to perform this conversion, but none for OS X, so I had to manually encode my ringtone file with FFmpeg.
The hardware itself, while pretty basic, is well designed and feels good. There are clearly labeled and intuitively laid out keys for commonly used features like DND, hold, mute, etc. The color display also has contextual soft-keys which are nice, but they are labeled only with icons and it’s not always clear what they do by the icon alone. It took me awhile to figure out that a 90º arrow and a dot means “enable call forwarding” while three horizontal lines and a curvy arrow means “call history”. The buttons all have a nice feel to them with the exception of the round four-way navigation pad, which feels a little mushy.
Sound Quality:
I normally use the phone with a wired headset and the sound quality is top-notch. Through the handset, the sound is understandably not as great, but works well enough and can put out plenty of volume. When speaking through the handset the called party could hear me fine, but be aware that the device doesn’t have any noise canceling if you’re using it in a noisy environment. This carries over to the built-in speaker phone; the mic will pick up a lot of background noise, but for a built-in speaker phone it worked just fine. The phone also supports Bluetooth headsets via an optional SNOM USB dongle.
Conclusion:
All-in-all I really like this phone. In fact after completing testing, it has become my primary desk phone. I’d recommend this for anyone looking for a full-featured and reliable desk phone. It’s easy to configure and use and has been rock solid the whole time I’ve been using it. 9/10
