Not A Bad Phone For Nine Bucks

We had one of those old Trimline phones of before-I-was-born vintage mounted on the wall in our kitchen at home for as long as I can remember. Everyone was happy with that, but unfortunately it wouldn’t fit on the mount after we put in a DSL filter, so we needed a new, simple, corded and wall-mountable phone.

Wall-mount corded phones don’t seem so popular these days. At Wal-Mart, we were met with two options: a five-dollar model and a nine-dollar model. I picked up the five-dollar phone for inspection. Two of the buttons were missing. Ha, those rowdy kids must have been messing with it right? I tried pressing some of the remaining buttons. Another one fell off in my hands. Hum, I think we’ll go all out for the nine-dollar model…

The nine-dollar model was a GE Slimline, with a 10 number speed dial, caller ID and call waiting built in. The base of the Slimline is black while the handset is two-tone black and silver, and the whole phone is slightly smaller and much lighter then our old phone. The Slimline has a pretty sleek, modern look, although it doesn’t fit in too well with our 80’s era kitchen cabinets.

Overall, the Slimline performs fine and we haven’t had any problems with it. The reception is clear to my ears and the phone feels comfortable as well. The Slimline phone mounted fine on top of the DSL filter, unlike the old Trimline.

This phone does have a pretty short cord. It stretches about eight feet safely. The cord is also not detachable so you can't replace it with a longer one. A little longer and it would be able to stretch to the far reaches of the tiny breakfast area like our old phone, but oh well. The buttons on the phone feel solid but they don’t light up like the classic Trimline either. Fortunately for me though, pressing the buttons emits the same traditional sound frequencies, unlike most new phones, so my pastime of playing Mary Had A Little Lamb on the phone isn’t dead yet.

The caller ID takes a whopping four AA batteries to power. The batteries go in the base unit while the caller ID is on the handset. The controls for the caller ID are on the handset as well, and are pretty intuitive to use. The main problem here is that the lettering on the display is small and dim, and the display is not backlit. It’s often a real hassle to run into the kitchen, flip on the light, lean over the counter and squint to read the tiny display.

Using the speed dial was simple but required a quick glance at the instruction manual. The caller ID display and buttons can double for storing and retrieving saved numbers. Flipping through the manual also revealed a couple other nifty features built into this phone, like “Storing a pause in memory” and “Chain dialing.” These features killed about fifteen minutes of time while I confirmed that they worked. It’s cool for a nine dollar phone I guess, but we don’t have any use for these features and I can’t see myself remembering the sequence of buttons needed to set them up either.

The most annoying thing about the Slimline phone is that the handset does not hang firmly on the base when the phone is mounted vertically on the wall. In particular, hanging up the handset requires special attention to make sure that the handset “grasps” onto the base. My Mom is worried about the handset dropping from the base and denting her rice cooker. Although the Slimline handset is moderately weighted for a modern phone, it is considerably lighter then our old Trimline handset, and I don’t see how it could possibly dent the heavy steel lid on that rice cooker.

The GE Slimline is a slightly modernized version of a classic design. It has some significant flaws, but I don’t think you can really go wrong for only nine bucks.