The truth is that no home phone is ever going to be mega exciting – we’re not talking cutting edge 4K TVs here; the design has hardly changed in the past ten years – so you’re looking for something that does the job at a friendly price. To my eyes, that product is the Panasonic KX-TGD622 (catchy name, isn’t it?). It might feel to you like the traditional home phone is a thing of the past, replaced by the mobile – but there are still good reasons to buy a handset for your landline, not least because they’re actually quite cheap.

HD calling means incredible sound quality on your home phone – almost as if the person you’re speaking to is in the room with you.As a phone specifically designed for older people, this one gets a lot of stuff right. It certainly lives up to its name with nice big buttons that should be easy to read for those with visual impairments. The text on the screen is also large enough to be easily legible and the few menu buttons are self-explanatory enough. The handset is nice and chunky but probably slightly heavier than most of the other devices on this list.

I’m going to cover these as one because they’re basically exactly the same (except for a few little bits that I’ll go over at the end of this review) and are both really good phones. At 16 hours of talktime and 200hr on standby, the battery life is standard; and the range of 100m should be big enough for most homes. Replacement parts, including batteries, line cords, additional handsets, etc, are available from the product helpdesk.

BT Essential Digital Home Phone

In the past internet service providers needed a landline to transfer data to and from your router. However, with fibre optic broadband becoming much more commonplace, even that necessity is dying out. Fibre optic broadband is an entirely separate kind of cabling, thus making it unnecessary to have a landline to use the internet.