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From: ron@brl-smoke.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>)
Newsgroups: net.consumers
Subject: Re: Telephone Answering Machines
Message-ID: <645@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 28-Jan-86 00:43:58 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.645
Posted: Tue Jan 28 00:43:58 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Jan-86 01:12:28 EST
References: <630@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 68

> 1. Dual Cassette: rather than a cassette to record the messages and a 
>    continuous look to record the outgoing message.

Actually, many now just use two standard cassettes.  

> 
> 2. Remote Message Retrieval: the one that sounded most interesting to 
>    me was the type where you could retrieve your messages from any 
>    touch tone telephone (no tone generator box required).  Many of 
>    them indicated that you could also do other things like play them 
>    again, continue recording messages after the last message or rewind 
>    the tape and begin recording from the cassette's beginning, etc.
This comes in several forms.   Never did find one that was really adequate.
Radio Shack and a couple of others have really nice beeper type control
units that let you do a lot.  Some touch tone (no-lonter TM) units allow
more control than others.  Mine for instance allows you to rewind or erase
the messages, plus enter a new outgoing message.  The problem is that
with the exception of the PANASONIC, all the machines I've seen don't
decode all the touch tones.  Some only do one row (essentially three tones)
and some only do one tone.  Essentially, this makes it very easy to hack
into the machine and pick up or destroy someone else's messages.  It also
keeps them from assigning all sorts of different features to different
buttons.  The Panasonic allows you to chose an arbitrary two tone sequence
as the password.

> 5. Variable length outgoing message:  This looked pretty standard on 
>    most of the dual cassette machines.  I gather that after your 
>    announcement and the tone, the outgoing cassette just rewinds to 
>    the beginning and waits for the next call.
You can't rewind a loop tape.  It just plays forward until it gets to
the start again, but it's probably about the same amount of time as
it would take the normal tape to rewind.

> 6. Toll Saver:  The purpose of this feature is to alert you prior to 
>    the machine answering your phone that there have been no new calls 
>    recorded since the last time you checked for messages.  I don't 
>    know how this works but I would guess that the "ring" must somehow 
>    be made to sound different.

Actually, what it does is to wait a longer number of rings before
answering if there are no messages.  For instance, mine will answer
the phone immediately if there are messages waiting, but waits four
rings, if there are none.  When calling long distance, I only let
it ring twice.

> o  FEATURES you found useful/necessary (add to or substract from my 
>    list).
Being able to change the message remotely.  Actually, the messages
sound better on my machine when you do them over the phone rather
than using the microphone that comes with it.  I suspect it just
picks up too much background noise, including the cassette moters
when using the local mike.

The other feature that I like is a device that records the date and
time on each message.

> o  BRAND NAMES and MODEL NUMBERS which you feel are worth 
>    investigating and/or with which you have some experience.

If you're not paranoid about someone else stealing your messages the
Phone Mate with the time stamp has been on sale all over the place
for ~120.  It also comes in a companion version that includes a phone/
dialer unit.

The Panasonic EASYPHONE is the only one that allowed any reasonable level
of paranoia.  Price was less than $100.

-Ron