As part of an project, I recently received a few Aastra 57i SIP phones at work. After spending a few days with them, I’ve decided to write up a short review of something of the things I like (and don’t like) about these phones.
Let’s start with the phone itself. It’s not much bigger than a normal telephone, and has the same basic “fancy IP phone” look you see with Cisco and others. One thing does stand out; the screen. It’s a fairly large screen, and backlight with a white light, instead of the normal Aastra golden brown color. Obviously, this makes it much more appealing on the eyes. However good, there is some bad. The viewing angle of the screen is not near as good as say the 480i, but still useable.
The device itself is also somewhat light compared to others I’ve used. At first, this seems nice, but as you use the phone you find it sliding around on the desk quite often. The additional of some no-slide matting takes care of this, but not a very cosmetic solution for an otherwise good looking phone.
The webui also boosts some useful features. Almost all configuration options can be set there, although I recommend the server configuration options for various reasons.
Overall, it’s a nice phone. The buttons are a bit odd, the screen a little hard to read when not looking at it just write, and a tad light. For the price, you can’t beat it though.
I’ve also got a few 480i and 9133i phones also. Hopefully, I’ll get around to sharing my thoughts on those as well.
