It gives a very flexible capability to manage two or less telephone lines over a wide physical distance. Three mailboxes with external access are great for large or small families. Sound quality is excellent. I love the speakerphone on the base and each handset. The distinctive ringers for each line let me ignore inbound calls on my outbound line (they're all telemarketers) completely. In short, my life improved for buying this system.

Shortcomings? Here goes:

Battery life on handset batteries is poor with the factory batteries. It may have gotten better in the year since I bought it. My solution has been to simply bite the bullet, go to Circuit City, and buy non-Panasonic replacement batteries for each handset. Problem solved.

When you are on a line and a call comes in on that line, the caller gets a busy signal. Can''t modern science find a way to ship that call directly to the digital answering machine?

Only 15 minutes of available time on the digital answerer. This is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. You can legitimately instruct callers to "leave a brief message" and cut them off at the one minute mark.

Only 50 slots for your directory. Given that this phone is intended to manage up to 8 phones on two lines, Panasonic should have given at least 200 slots. By being clever, you can have 50 slots per phone (i.e., up to 400 numbers) but that defeats one of the sweetest features of this system, which is to swap listings ("copy") from phone to phone. Hey Panasonic -- why not allow the user to create multiple listings for each name, like most cell phone directories now do? This would be a perfectly applicable way to increase the storage in this unit.

The unit is complex to learn initially, but not as bad as some.

In summary, this is an improvement over my previous phone "system," and has allowed me to forego the monthly $7.95 voice mail charge from my local carrier.