BT's home phones have always been a mixed bag - for every one you get that's a beaut, another's a bit of a clunker. Sadly the BT Stratus 1500 is the latter.
The problems start when you first fetch the BT Stratus 1500 out of its box. It's massive. Putting it side-by-side against Philips ID555 is like having a size content between Princess Leia and Darth Vader: the Stratus is very, very tall, very bulky and with its gloss-black finish and white-on-black LCD display, pretty intimidating too.
The gloom isn't relieved by any fancy lighting effects either. The BT Stratus 1500's LCD is very small and dim for a phone of this bulk and there's no keypad backlight. At least the numbers are big enough and white enough for you to see them in low light. The phone's a lot tackier-looking than the pictures suggest too.
Even the build quality's not great. Pressing down on the BT Stratus 1500's keypad moans, groans and creaks more than a galleon of goths awash on a stormy sea.
Features
On the positive side, the Stratus 1500 offers a reasonable range of features for your £63. It comes with two handsets, one main station with a 12-minute digital answerphone built in, and a second base station for charging. Both have the same gloss black finish as the handsets, although the answerphone does provide some relief thanks to blue charging status lights and 7-segment LCD which tells you how many messages you have.
Another key features is the 100 name-and-number contact book, although frustratingly you can't sync your contacts details across different handsets - you have to enter them over and over again for each one. Since the BT Stratus 1500 can support up to 5 different handsets, you could be in for lot of tedious data entry. You can also send and receive text messages.
The phone's UI is rather familiar too. In many ways reminiscent of the Philips ID555, it somehow manages to be worse by including the kind of mono icons any 3-year-old could draw, alongside some very spindly text which again is dim white / grey on a very black background. Eyestrain anyone?
At least you'll love the ringtones: Bach, Flight Of The Bumblee, and even Reggae get the polyphonic treatment, but the results are so shrill you don't so much want to answer the phone as throw the whole thing out of the window. Call quality is only average, sounding rather tinny and closed in. The Philips ID555 is a much better bet in this respect.
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uptonion
August 25th 2011
2. I went to the exceptional effort of registering with this fine site, just so I could review this piece of inconsiderate trash they call a phone.
Firstly the review from delticpt1 is way off the mark. Unless, you move at the speed of a tortoise with a brick house on its back.
The phone is creaky and resembles the phone you give to kids as a toy, where each button makes a different noise. It is so poorly made its embarrassing. Also, after you end a call (this bit really annoys me)... You have to wait for the phone to acknowledge the call is ended, then the screen goes blank, then it reboots haha. And this is on all, not mine! So if you're a tele-canvasser or someone that likes to make more than one call in succession, give it a miss.
Also.. Try pressing redial lol. It highlights calls from when you first had the phone. You can't find any sign of the 100s of numbers dialled since then.
I was annoyed with this phone so much I binned it. I couldnt be arsed taking it to the store. But then I thought, if I dont mention it.. Some other fool will buy it.
So thanks techradar for hosting this page and allowing me to say 'DON'T BUY THIS JOKE OF A PHONE, IT'S AN ABSOLUTE MESS!'
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delticpt1
August 10th 2011
1. Hi I purchased a BT Stratus 1500 I actually like this phone except for the very poor sound quility it is so tinny & at times very muffled & a job to understand the caller. I did complain to BT & they informed me it was a fault with the base unit which they replaced but did not solve the problem. BT know about this problem with the Stratus 1500 but do not seem to want to know. So think twice about purchasing this model.
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