Thanks to one of our great suppliers we've finally got our hands on the snom 820 and have had a chance to play with it for the last couple of weeks. The snom 820 has been out around the world for quite a while but unfortunately they seem to have been on a slow boat to New Zealand.

Even though we're late getting the phone itself New Zealand has been recognised a little and is now a tone selection in the setup, previously Australia was used as a close equivalent.

The 820 builds on the firmware from the 3x0 series, so has all the existing features such as the great web interface, the ability to control the phone via HTTP requests (this makes it super easy to implement a click to dial solution) and versatile function keys etc.

There doesn't appear to be info around about this so I'll just note here that my snom headset from a snom 360 works fine with the 820.

The big red message waiting light at the top right corner is bright and pretty un-missable compared to the small LED on the older models.

We use FreeSWITCH here at nicegear and like the previous snom phones, the 820 works without a hitch. Wideband audio, TLS+SRTP for secure calls, BLF and all other features work nicely out of the box.

Good things

It's definitely stylish. The colour display is a massive improvement over the snom 3x0 series - it's high resolution, bright and used well. There's a nice little alpha transparency overlay that comes up on incoming calls

The handset is a good weight, is comfortable in the hand and on the ear and is acoustically very nice. Combined with high definition wideband audio codecs such as G722 it has a beautiful rich sound. Another nice little touch is the lack of a physical hook switch, it's using some sort of sensor to detect whether the handset is on hook or not.

The base speaker has also been improved and also sounds great. I used to tell people that the Polycom acoustics were slightly ahead of the snom range but in my opinion the 820 has evened this out nicely.

Sitting on my desk next to the Apple aluminium keyboard it fits in pretty well :)

The bad bits

It has to be said; the price. Unfortunately at over $1000 dollars it's not really priced for the masses.

A minor nitpick; for some reason snom decided to swap the OK (tick) and Cancel (cross) buttons around from the snom 300 series. This is still taking a bit of getting used to.

Conclusion

If you can afford it, the snom 820 is a very very nice phone and one I would recommend without hesitation. I haven't found any issues at all so far, I'll be sure to add a comment if I come across any.