Great sound. Poor features and user interface.

I bought this Linksys Skype phone rather than the original DualPhone because the Linksys includes a speaker phone. Bad decision! The CIT300's sound quality is very good, and the phone itself is small and comfortable to carry, and I like the fact that it uses rechargeable AAA NiMH batteries (handy if you do not have a chance to recharge the phone on its cradle during a long day of phone calls), but the call features and user interface are poor.

*** Far and away the biggest problem: why would anybody design a dual (landline/VOIP) phone which cannot switch between land and VOIP calls??!! If you are on a Skype call and want to answer a landline call, you have to hang up the Skype call, and vice versa. Yes, it can switch between two Skype calls, but that's a normal Skype function, no big credit to the phone itself. (And it's not as if you can answer that incoming Skype call (when you are already using the landline) on the PC; this phone disables Skype's normal PC audio, though if you have more time I do think that you can turn it back on by switching Skype's audio drivers from the phone back to the PC's normal audio drivers. Not something you'll do in time to answer an incoming call, though, and you'd have to switch the drivers back before you could use the Skype phone again.)

The strange menu and command layout seem to have been copied from a feature list with no usability consideration or testing. Here's what's bothered me most so far:

*It requires a tedious sequence of 3-4 key presses to get to the landline phone directory, Yet there are 3 different ways to get to the Skype directory by pressing a single key. Why not distribute those keys among other common functions, instead of having such redundancy / overlap?

* After you make a SkypeOut (i.e. Skype to phone) call from your Skype contact list, the "recently dialed" call list shows only the phone number, not the name of the entry. Not very useful unless you have all your Skypeout phone numbers semi-memorized!

* Likewise, when calling a landline or skypeout number from a directory, the display shows only the number, not the name of the entry.

* When dialing, and also in the recently called list, phone numbers are not formatted (e.g. with dashes) to make them more readable.

* The recently dialed list does not include the time of the call, nor the duration, even though the phone includes a clock and a call timer. (You can go to a different menu (5-6 key presses away), to see the duration of the last call only, or the running totals of all dialled and received calls)

* Landline phone book entry names are at most 10 characters long, forcing constant abbreviation. 16 characters is standard and much more useful. Not quite as bad, but only the first 14 characters of skype directory entries are displayed.

* This is not so unusual, but I'm spoiled: Menu commands do not have numbers by each item, so there are no shortcuts to get to a command, just lots of scrolling through menus and clicking where a single number press should suffice.

* You can't use SkypeOut to dial a number from your landline phone book.

* The following issue is (I think) also present on the DualPhone, but it is still very annoying and unfriendly: even though this phone is connected to a computer (via its base station), you have to populate the landline phone book manually, one entry at a time, using the phone's keypad. You can't compose the phone directory on the PC and download it. (In contrast, the skype directory is maintained on the net and automatically copied from the PC into the phone).

Overall, this is a disappointing phone. Such fine promise thrown away for no good reason. I would hope that Linksys would release a firmware upgrade to correct some of these problems, but given the way the consumer electronics market usually works, more likely they will never be corrected in this phone, and won't even be corrected in new phones until several product cycles have passed.