Yealink W52P DECT cordless phone

 

Thanks to our partners at 3CX and Alloy, we were given the opportunity to test a Yealink W52P DECT cordless phone for the past few weeks and document our findings.

As this is our first on hands product review I will try and be impartial and truthful about our experience with the product.

Normally when you get to review a product you start off with its intended use, but I want to start off with Yealink W52P’s aesthetics, it is after all the first thing you are greeted with when receiving the device.

The Yealink W52P we received was a glossy black with silver accents to add a dual tone contemporary look, the kind of look which seems to be in with phones as of 2013/2014.
It’s not a very pretty or overly sleek phone, but it surely goes out of its way to not be ugly.
Some phones light up too many colours and have features that do not blend. This phone is discreet and looks just like a modern handset should look like.
The back of the phone comes in a nonglossy black plastic which adds some much needed grip compared to the front and sides.

The screen is bright and comes with a colour display. It does have a custom GUI that is sometimes not too straight forward, but being into technology navigating the menus wasn’t too difficult for me or others in the office.
However I have to say some of the menus seemed to be named incorrectly as I had to go back out of a few menus and reselect what I originally intended… But that could be just me.

The buttons are all way too small and I have small fingers for an adult.
I found myself having to use the tip of my finger nails to navigate and press the buttons on too many occasions. They are also too small in their height from the face of the phone.
Maybe bevelling the edges a little and if they were created in a little softer rubber it would improve the feel of the keys tremendously.

The phones sound quality is quite good compared to my current smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S3).
I tried turning the phone away from me and I could still clearly hear the other person and they could hear me.
We did have one day when the phone played up and customers were complaining of sound quality but it was done to our VoIP playing up.

One feature that the phone comes with is a handle. It does make the phone slightly more difficult and uncomfortable o handle but I can see the benefit if you want to hang the phone on a stand or a belt. Personally I didn’t use this feature but I commend Yealink for including it with the phones.
The clip does come off, but I left it on during our testing time.

Battery life on the Yealink W52P is very good compared to what we’ve been accustomed to accept for wireless handsets and smartphones, of course this is down to the comparatively small screen and that its main use is voice calls only.
I did use the phone extensively and it never went below 2 out of 3 lines on the battery.
The charger is very good in terms of quickly and efficiently charging the phone.
The charger forces the phone to stand up vertically but does not provide enough support as I found the phone being knocked over even by movements and bumps in a table.
I also had to be accurate and extra gentle in placing the phone upright on its charger otherwise it would fall straight to the ground.
Maybe adding a deeper groove for the charger would improve this.

Overall the experience with the Yealink W52P was positive.
It is light, the receiver distance is fantastic, it charges quickly and stays charged for days on end even with moderate usage.
A good product but does fall short in its overall aesthetics and general day to day usability.
3.5/5

In the world of IT the continuing trend is to go smaller, lighter, virtualised and to the cloud.
The Dell Wyse Thin Clients are a piece of kit that will continue to give this directional trend a lot of incentive and life in the years to come.

Wyse is a developer and manufacturer of “Cloud Client Computing” products.
These products include thin client software, thin client hardware and the desktop virtualisation software which is done in collaboration with big named brands such as Citrix, IBM, Microsoft and VMware.

Wyse Technology as it was formerly known was founded in early 1981 as a manufacturer of character terminals (A computer that communicates with one block of information at a time).
The company quickly moved into the Personal Computing marketplace and had moderate success by selling their units much cheaper than the competitors at the time.

This all lead to where we are today, the Acquisition of Wyse by Dell and they now are a leading manufacturer of thin clients.

Thin clients are a computer system that depends heavily on other computers (a server) to function in the traditional PC way.
They are usually bare bones and therefore can come in very small packages compared to the traditional PC’s

The benefits of thin clients include their overall size, which means they can be stored away or hidden from the user.
They provide a single point of failure and greater security.
This means that the network cannot be compromised easily or infected by viruses as the thin client themselves are getting their information form the server. This means that if the server is protected well, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the thin client (software or hardware) it wot really affect or compromise the network.

Another huge benefit is the overall unit price. Because they have so few internal hardware components and little or no moving parts, they can be produced at a much cheaper price than traditional PC’s.
This means a lower operating cost, lower cost of ownership as they run with less power, cheaper to replace and can therefore be easier to upgrade if need be.

At A&STech we offer thin clients as a cheaper, safer more secure way of computing to our customers, especially if all they need is a PC that does spreadsheets, word processing and data entry as its main functions.

At some point, Office 2013 will report that the Microsoft Office 2013 Suite installed is unlicensed even though your subscription is still valid. It will display a red “Unlicensed Product” message at the top of the Microsoft Office 2013 application. Reactivating it is not very straightforward.

Provided you still have a valid Office 365 subscription, do the following to easily reactivate:

1. Close all opened Microsoft Office 2013 Application.
2. Run Microsoft Word 2013 as Administrator.
3. Create a new Blank Document.
4. Go to File -> Account and then Sign out.
5. Close Microsoft Word 2013.
6. Run Microsoft Word 2013 as Administrator again.
7. Go to File -> Account and then Sign In.
8. Close all opened Microsoft Office 2013 Application.
9. Normally open any Microsoft Office 2013 application and the red “Unlicensed Product” should disappear.

Worst case scenario if the above procedure will not work is to Uninstall Microsoft Office 2013, Sign in to Microsoft Online Portal to reinstall Office 2013.