Review: Snom D765 VoIP phone

So I thought it was time I replaced my existing Snom 370 telephones, after 7 years, with a new model.   After much waiting, eventually the phone I was after came on the market, and so I bought two of the Snom D765 phones.  The Snom D765 is an updated version of the Snom 760, with better hardware inside.  The new design is considerably different to the Snom 370, and looks a lot more modern.  The new phone is taller and not as wide.  It also has a colour screen, but you’d hardly notice because not much of the screen is in colour except for the green box to show the phone has been registered.  (I suspect the colour screen works a lot better when you start including photographs of your contacts)

The Web interface is largely similar to previous Snom models with a few extra features.  However, I think they’ve got some bugs to fix on the 8.7.5.28 firmware because pushing certain buttons on the Web UI causes the wrong thing to happen, especially when you push red crosses to delete lists of missed calls etc.  The really irritating thing is that the IPv6 support works, but I cannot understand for the life of me why on earth it will not resolve AAAA records.   The only way I can get it to work is to put IPv6 address literals in instead!  (And yes, I have reported the bug.)  Once I did that, it connected to my IPv6-capable FreeSWITCH installation perfectly.

What can I say about this phone?  Well, it’s a Snom.  If you’re used to previous versions of the Snoms it’s pretty much more of the same.  However, they’ve got some stupid bugs to fix in the firmware but otherwise the phone works fine.  Still no Opus support yet which is a shame.  Also new (relative to the 370s) are Bluetooth and USB sound card support so you can plug in a USB headset, and multicolour (red/green/yellow) LEDs, unlike the 370 which only had yellow.  Lots of possibilities with that, I’m sure once I’ve worked out how to control them.

Likes: New modern design, IPv6 support, USB headset support, colour screen
Dislikes: Firmware still full of stupid bugs, lack of Opus support, can’t resolve AAAA records.

Rating: 8 out of 10.  Nice phone, needs some work on the firmware