As you may already know, we allow our customers to use any standards based SIP phone with our service. They can bring the SIP phones they purchased for a previous service provider (assuming the provider didn’t put restrictions on those phones) or purchase them new from any vendor. We’ve never put limitations on our customers when it comes to the phones or the devices they use, but we’re well aware of the fact that some phones simply work better than others.
It’s important to us because—for a majority of our end users—phones are the only interface sitting between them and our service. If that interface doesn’t work well, or doesn’t do everything we advertise, then we look bad even if the root of the problem is completely out of our hands.
At first we looked around for sites that provide comprehensive reviews to point our customers to. Something like a CNET, except with a section dedicated to VoIP desk phones. CNET actually lists VoIP phones on their website, but their ‘reviews’ are mostly blank.
Unfortunately, with the exception of a few good personal blogs, it was slim pickings.
That’s why we decided to start writing about phones, routers, and other devices in our company blog. Later, we made things more official and ported all of that content into a section of our site called OnSIP team reviews where we started formally reviewing phones, giving them ratings, and citing problems where we found them.
The layout of OnSIP team reviews was incredibly basic. We used Drupal 5’s book module to create a hierarchical structure and manually updated a formatted table on the main page each time we posted a new review. This main page got longer and longer as time went on. It didn’t look great, there was no sort functionality to speak of, and the whole thing was a pain to manage, but we were hoping that the usefulness of the content would speak for itself.
I’m glad to say that it did. Over the years, we’ve gotten many nice comments about our OnSIP team reviews, which is why I’m excited to talk about our recent overhaul to this section. It’s now simply called VoIP phone reviews. Like the old OnSIP team reviews, the main page is an aggregated view of every write-up we’ve done, but this new version is simplified and paginated. Visitors can now sort by the rating we give each phone, and by the phone model. The four most recently posted reviews are highlighted. We’ve included side menus to this section that allows users to also sort by phone type or phone brand.
The phone reviews themselves have also also undergone some changes. Check out our review for Bria for iPhone. The first you’ll notice is that we have tabs at the top of the review that correspond to the different software versions of the soft phone application. Everything in the review can potentially change when you go from version to version. We’ve also added easy-to-consume ‘the Good’, ‘the Bad’, and ‘Quick Specs’ boxes for anyone to quickly skim through. Finally, we’ve allowed customer reviews so that every visitor to the website can post their own reviews and star ratings for the different phones we feature.
We hope you’ll find the new OnSIP VoIP phone reviews even more useful than before.