Snom 320

The 320 comes with a built-in full duplex speakerphone, dual Ethernet connection, the power over Ethernet feature, and three-party conference bridging. Other functions you might expect in a SIP business phone such as auto-answer, do-not-disturb mode, directories, transfer, hold, and call blocking are included as well.

The Snom 320 also comes with 12 line appearances, which is more than most business phones found in this price bracket. It is pretty clear that the 320 was designed to be used as an office phone or by someone who spends a lot of time on the line.

Feature Overview

• Class: Mainstream
• Application targets: Office
• 2 by 24 character monochrome LCD display
• 23 dedicated hard keys, 4 context sensitive soft keys
• 12 programmable keys with LEDs
• dual Ethernet connection
• speakerphone
• pricing: ~$155

First Impressions

The first thing you’ll notice about the 320 is that it has a lot of buttons. And we mean a lot. Huge buttons, tiny buttons, and buttons that don’t have any discernible purpose when you first get the phone. The monochrome 2 by 24 character LCD display is small, and though other sources say its backlit, the LCD display we have on the 320 in our office is clearly not.

Compared to the Polycom phones that we usually use here at the Junction Networks office, the Snom 320s look like something out of the late 1980s. This isn’t necessarily a negative observation, but we noticed that while the Polycom phones tend to have rounded sides, the Snom 320s have clean 90-degree angles at each edge, which may make the phone appear plainer (at least to us). The graphite coloring, on the other hand, is very aesthetically appealing.

Phone Configuration

Installation and configuration of the 320 is quick and easy with their web interface. Instructions for how to configure this phone, as well as the 300 and 360 can be found in the OnSIP Knowledgebase. The phone does not take any time to reboot when settings are saved, and we are very grateful for that feature. However, when you do register or re-register your 320, your LCD display screen might ask you to enter in a password. Simply click the “X” button and you should find that your phone is perfectly installed and successfully registered to your network. We suspect that you are supposed to enter in your SIP password, but doing so did not work for us.

Junction Networks Testing

At Junction Networks, we put each of the phones we use through a multi-step interoperability test in which we put the phones through 30 test cases. An example of a test case would be the following:

Test phone calls phone B
B picks up
Test phone puts B on hold
B puts test phone on hold
Test phone retrieves B
B retrieves Test phone

While being on hold, there must not be audio between the parties. After the parties have retrieved each other, there must be audio both ways.

UPDATE: (4/7/10) As of firmware release version 7.3.30, the following issue has been resolved. We have bumped up our JN test rating by one .

We’d like to tell you that the 320 passed our interoperability test with flying colors, but we ran into one small issue. From our testing, it seems that the phone cannot complete attended transfers of calls with some other vendors’ phones. Here is the attended transfer test case:

“Test phone calls phone B
B picks up
B puts Test phone on hold
B calls phone C
C picks up
B transfers Test phone to C

Call must be transferred correctly to C. B must be released correctly after the transfer. When C picks up, audio must work in both ways between test phone and C. When test phone is on hold, there is no audio between it and phone B.”

During our most recent test, we used a Polycom phone as ‘B’. When we tried to start a new call after putting the snom 320 on hold, it simply did not work. We found similar results when using Grandstream and Linksys phones as ‘B’. It also looks like that this issue applies to calls made over the Internet and to calls made on the same network. Currently, there is no known fix.

Voice Quality

The voice quality of the handset is decent, and is comparable to some of the other analog telephones on the market. While it is not exceptional, it is what we have come to expect from phones in this price bracket. If you want HD voice with Snom, however, you would have to invest in one of their 800 series phones, which are a bit pricier than the 320. We understand that the Snom 370 also features improved audio quality, though we have yet to get our hands on one.

Speakerphone

We did not particularly enjoy using the speakerphone as much as we thought we would. We might be spoiled by the sound quality on the Polycom speakerphones we have in our office, but we found that the feature on the 320 was unsatisfying. Having a full duplex speakerphone on a phone in this price range also isn’t as impressive as it used to be. Polycom entry-level phones, which are even cheaper than the 320, have the same feature, except that it is done better.

UPDATE: (4/7/10) Snom has since upgraded the firmware on this phone to support G.722, making it yet another one of the now many 'HD-compatible' phones on the market. On HD calls (between any combination of two 'HD capable' or 'HD compatible' SIP user agents), the voice quality is noticeably improved. We have bumped up our voice quality rating by one .

Ease of Use

Overall, the Snom 320 is very easy to use. There are dedicated buttons for most of the features on the phone so you can access what you want quickly and easily. Most of the dedicated keys are unusually small, but we would imagine users would have no problem getting used to it. Having 12 programmable keys that can be used to gain quick access to important numbers and extensions can also be very convenient.

Here at Junction, we’re pretty much suckers for anything with a big LCD display so we weren’t completely thrilled with the 2 by 24 character monochrome display on the 320. Having a display this size means that users will have to do a lot of scrolling and searching the first few times they need to adjust settings, but like the small buttons, its really not an issue once you get used to it. If you want a bigger display, more features and can shell out the extra 50 bucks, we would recommend going for the Snom 360 or 370.

Final Thoughts

The Snom 320 is a feature-rich phone designed for someone who spends a lot of time on the line. Although Snom got quite a few things right, the 320 kind of feels like the company tried to cram a couple of extra features into a 300 phone so that they’d have a middle tier in their 300 series line. An example would be the speakerphone feature, which we found to be less than stellar. What the phone does have going for it is the 12-line display that most other phones in this price range will not have. The price is also pretty attractive for a SIP business phone in this class. Unless these two things sell you immediately on the phone, we would recommend either looking into a Snom 360, or any other of their higher-end models.

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Average: 5 (2 votes)