Product Reviews

Solwise's V500-DS is a DECT cordless phone. Its base station has a standard telephone socket for making normal calls over a landline, but it also has an Ethernet port to connect to your router, enabling you to make Skype calls without a PC.

We've seen phones like this before, including Philips' VOIP841 and Netgear's SPH200D. While both of those products cost nearly £100, the V500-DS is comparatively cheap at just £70 and looks just as classy.

Setup couldn't be easier, and there's a helpful instruction manual in the unlikely event that you get stuck. Once the base station is plugged into a broadband connection and the phone has charged, it should receive an IP address automatically. You can also set one manually if you haven't got a DHCP server.

Setting up a Skype account is as simple as typing in your username and password, although the phone sometimes behaved strangely and wouldn't let us press a key enough times to bring up the letter we wanted. Instead,

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it locked up and put in a different character. This was a minor annoyance, but we soon had our account working.

The V500-DS displays all your Skype contacts and their online status, just like the desktop application. Selecting a contact to call is easy. You can use SkypeOut to make a regular landline call, too, although you'll need to have credits as you can't top your account up from the phone. Alternatively, you can dial out using your regular landline. The handset can be set to use either Skype or your landline by default, or prompt every time you enter a number.

The main difference between this phone and its Philips and Netgear rivals is that it has a combined charging dock and base station, so it has to be placed within a cable's length of your router.The Philips and Netgear handsets have separate charging docks and base stations, so you can place the handset anywhere in your home. These phones also have 500-entry address books, compared with the V500-DS's 50-entry address book. These are only minor differences though, and unless you physically can't have the phone near your router or you want to store more telephone numbers, the V500-DS is a perfectly good phone.

Voice quality was great and we found little difference between landline and Skype calls. However, the V500-DS doesn't sound as good as Philips' VOIP841, which is the clearest DECT Skype phone we've used. The VOIP841 is also a little more attractive and has more features, making it a better buy. That said, Solwise's V500-DS is excellent value and perfect for those on a tighter budget.