Got given one free to review, have replaced my old BT hudson with it.
Initial impressions are the OSD functions seem more backwards than the hudson although it has more features, the OSD itself is inferior in ease of use and performance.
Casing to remove for battery swap is very hard to remove, I was worried about breaking the phone.
Base feels too light and cheap, the hudson base has weight to it, so e.g. the weight of the cables is enough to drag the 8600's base from where I wanted it. The base also has no LCD whilst the hudson base does.
The phone has features to protect against unwanted calls, it can either be turned off (functions like normal phone), set to only allow contacts, rest put through filter system, set to filter international numbers and allow rest and also can be customised more then that (which I not looked at yet), from what I can see there is no specific option for witheld numbers.
The filtering works by asking the caller for their ID, then the ID is played out the speaker of the phone, at that point if the owner is around they can put the call through, block it or let it go to answer machine, the phone is able to remember the setting for the phone number.
Right now I have the filtering disabled as I do occasionally get calls from the NHS, that could cause them to hang up as the NHS dont like leaving messages and what not as they say it can breach confidentiality, so in my case I will likely grant NHS permission to leave me a message in the automated answer message.
Given most rogue callers now days seem to spoof their number I dont think this device will be that useful other then perhaps the blocking of international numbers.
I dont have any comment on battery life yet, the batteries are about 33% more capacity than the hudson tho.